A/N: I said the next chapter was going to be a big B&W chapter. That was my plan way back when, but when I started writing this chapter, I saw it as more of a set-up chapter. Or maybe I just needed more set up. In any event, some B&W developments are coming, but more in the next chapter than this one. I'm hoping that I can get the next chapter up next week, but I can say with greater confidence that it won't take four weeks.
They didn't find him that night. They called and texted him, using Sheffield's phone, but he didn't respond. They went to Soho, where he had an apartment, and not finding him there, they went out to Long Island, where he had rented a summer home, which showed no recent signs of occupancy. On their return to the city in the early morning hours, they went to the investment firm, on the off chance that he might be burning the midnight oil in his office. Giving up on their hunt, Myka directed the driver to take them to her hotel, suggesting to Helena that they get some sleep before going back to the investment firm and relaunching the investigation Pete and Travis had closed months before. "We have no choice," she sighed, calling Claudia yet again. "Because we obviously don't know what we're dealing with anymore. If a replicated artefact's properties can, well, drift, there could be more people at the firm than we know who have an artefact. Jacqui and I were screening only for blips in the investment patterns. Who knows what we should be looking for now?" The car stopped in front of the hotel. "You can sleep on the sofa," she offered abruptly, offhandedly. Then, into the phone, "No, not you, Claudia."
Helena shook her head, wondering if Myka was extending the invitation only because they were both exhausted and she thought to spare her the trip back out to Brooklyn, or if she was acting on an old Warehouse memory, the times when she had come down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, and there Helena would be at the table with a mug of tea between her hands. "I'll be fine," she said, choosing an all-purpose response that would be equally appropriate regardless of the motivation behind Myka's offer. "Besides, I'd like to change before we grill Sheffield's colleagues. It'll be hard enough to talk about 'terroristic threats' without having them all staring down my blouse." Helena gave her lapel a tug and sent Myka a wry glance.
Myka jerked her head to the side in acknowledgment as she got out of the car. "Seven-thirty in the firm's lobby," she said, quickly ducking her head back in. At Helena's nod, she swung the door shut with her hip. "No, not you, Claud," she redirected into the phone. "Hey, we can use another agent or two out here. . . ." Helena watched her flash an appreciative smile at the doorman as he held the door open for her, and though the smile was only one courtesy exchanged for another, it lit her face, erasing the fatigue of the past hours and making Helena wish she had said yes, but the car was already merging into traffic.
Helena slumped against the seat, letting her own exhaustion take hold. The effect of Sheffield's artefact, his collapse, and the wait at the hospital for news on his condition had been draining enough, but the quiet conversation she and Myka had had - it had filled in some of the gaps of the past ten years but left others unexplained. Her own confession, such as it was, came years too late, long after Myka, by rights, should have stopped caring whether her suspicions were correct. And whatever new light it might have shed on her behavior was hardly a flattering one, a woman pitifully attempting to fix a relationship, hollow at its core, within a Victorian frame of reference that was equally as spurious. She hadn't believed in companionate marriages when "Victorian" didn't yet exist as an adjective. She had viewed them with the same scorn she reserved for chastity, the existence of God, and the natural superiority of men. Yet there she had been solemnly trying to explain to Myka that she had hoped things with Nate would work out because they had both loved Adelaide. What had she expected Myka to make of that, of her?
Then there was Myka's half-explanation of the end of her marriage, which provided everything except the reason why. It wasn't a telling that welcomed questions, despite raising them, and Helena hadn't asked any, but now, watching darkened buildings pass by on either side of the hired car she had spent an outrageous sum of money on to take them on their fruitless search for Bergstrom, she felt that Myka's narrative itself had been a question, that the recital of facts - the spiking of Drew's temperature, Pete's raiding of the vending machines - was only the prologue to a question that Myka had looked to her to answer, as if she, Helena, could explain why the sum of a child's recovery and his return to his parents had been a minus instead.
There had been no further talk of Nate and Adelaide or Pete on the ride to Soho or Long Island. What conversation there was had been about where to look for Bergstrom and the frustrating lack of useful information at Sheffield's condo. The long stretches of silence hadn't had the easiness that Helena remembered from their past assignments together, but they hadn't been uncomfortable either. What was forming between the two of them now, part working partnership, part friendship, part something nebulous and unspoken was familiar, and the silences were what bridged the awkwardness as they worked their way toward each other. Or maybe the silences were marking the dead spots in a relationship that, whether it existed ten years ago or was coming into being now, suggested it could be many things but would end up being none of them. Or possibly, Helena reminded herself, the silences between them had been just that, silence.
The car was double parked outside her loft, which, to Helena, was barely more familiar than the scores of buildings that had seemed to overhang the car like trees as it glided beneath them. She handed the driver a credit card - the extravagance wouldn't be going on an expense account. She had a car, a BMW or a Benz, she had difficulty remembering which, she drove it so rarely, but it had been more efficient, if infinitely more expensive, to be driven on their search, rather than trying to navigate the streets on their own. On a few unavoidable occasions she had been the driver on assignments during her stint with 13, and Pete and Myka had both groaned at being her passengers, Pete because she drove too slowly and Myka because she was too distracted, always spotting something in the distance that she wanted to investigate and instinctively steering the car in that direction regardless of the obstacles in its path. Perhaps that was why Myka hadn't raised a fuss about using a livery service when she had suggested it. A livery service, not a taxi. Helena had hopes that her kidneys might still function after an evening spent jolting along the city's streets.
In the dark, the loft seemed more warehouse space than living space, but Helena didn't bother to turn on any lights on the main floor, there was enough light coming through the windows to see her way up the stairs. The lamp on one of the nightstands provided enough light to undress by, and as she casually dropped her jacket and blouse on the floor, she saw the glint of her locket on the top of the bureau. She picked it up, feeling the metal beginning to warm against her fingers. Not all that long ago, she would have been unable to imagine not wearing it, but it had attracted too much interest from her clients. They could generally recognize an antique when they saw one, and when they weren't trying to buy the locket from her, they were asking her where she had gotten it and if it still held the original memento. The easiest way to avoid the questions had been not to wear it, although she usually carried it on her. She hadn't been with Christina when her daughter had needed her most; keeping the locket with her, it was the smallest of gestures but the only one she could make. Tonight was one of the rare exceptions when she hadn't had the locket with her. It wasn't the right jewelry to accessorize her outfit, and she chose not to tuck it away in a pocket of her suit. In the event that she did end up under Sheffield's power, she hadn't wanted Christina to be a witness. A pointless indulgence of a propriety she had only begrudgingly upheld when Christina was alive, and silly as well since Christina could no longer be a witness to anything, but she had left the locket on the bureau. She put it on now, running the delicate links through her fingers. It wouldn't make sleep come any faster, but it would make her feel less alone as she waited out the night.
#####
The color of Myka's suit was an institutional gray, which complemented the business-like display of her credentials to the two senior partners of the firm and her flat, colorless delivery of the news to them that the Department of Homeland Security was reopening its investigation of their firm. The two men were somewhat gray-looking themselves, still trying to digest the call they had received from Sheffield's wife earlier in the morning.
"First Stewart died, and now Dwight's in intensive care," the older of them said, his hand shaking as he brought a cup of coffee to his lips. "And you're saying you think they've been in contact with a person or persons conspiring against the interests of the United States?" The china of the cup was so thin that Helena saw the shadow of the coffee as it lapped against the side.
"That's what we're trying to determine," Myka said. "We're hoping to speak to Mr. Bergstrom today."
The two partners looked at each other. The one whose hands weren't shaking but whose face was grayer than his colleague's said, with an uncomfortable glance at Myka, "He called his assistant a little while ago. He said he's not feeling well and won't be coming in."
"We tried his home and his summer rental last night. He wasn't at either one. Do you know where he might be staying?" Myka added quietly, "If one of you were to give him a call, would he return it?"
The two men exchanged another quick look. "We have a joke around the office that Russ's phone has been surgically attached to him. We tried to reach out once we heard about Dwight, but he didn't call us back. That's unlike him. But maybe he's just that under the weather, or Diane's already told him about Dwight, and he's in shock." The older partner shrugged. "His assistant may know something we don't."
Unlike Sheffield's assistant, Bergstrom's looked less like an ex-model and more like the Staten Island mother of three she claimed she was. She obligingly searched her files but could offer no additional contact information. "I think his mother and father are in Florida, and he has a sister, in Albuquerque or El Paso, someplace like that." When Myka asked if they could look in his office, Bergstrom's assistant reluctantly opened the door. "I doubt you'll find anything in here that'll tell you where he is. He doesn't like clutter."
Furnished similarly to Sheffield's office, the room was starker, devoid of the keepsakes and photos that Sheffield had displayed. What dominated it was the large reproduction of a post-Impressionist painting, mounted on the wall behind his desk. A scene of brightly dressed young women perched on the knees of several carousers, the painting looked familiar to Helena, and she tried to place where she had seen the original. The assistant, noticing Helena's interest, volunteered, "That came from Mr. Afton's office. They were close, and Russ took his death so hard."
Myka had been flipping through a planner on Bergstrom's desk. "He kept his own schedule?"
The assistant's smile suggested that it was a quirk she tolerated but didn't completely understand. "He said he remembered his appointments better if he wrote them down."
"Funny, when we were to meet with Mr. Bergstrom yesterday, Mr. Sheffield said he had an obligation that prevented him from joining us, but there's nothing here." Myka held the planner out to Bergstrom's assistant.
She frowned, turning over a page then turning it back. "That's strange. Russ was set to meet with you and then he ran out of the office, telling me to let Mr. Sheffield know that he couldn't make it. I thought he had accidentally double-booked himself." She set the planner on the desk. "He didn't return to the office, and, of course, today he's already called to say that he won't be in. He's usually so reliable. I can't remember the last time he didn't come into the office, sick or no. He lives this job."
"It is does sound a little out character," Myka softly agreed. "Rushed out of the office, you say, right before we arrived?"
"I'm surprised you didn't cross paths. It was that close." The phone rang at the assistant's desk, and she hurried to answer it.
Myka leaned against Bergstrom's desk and crossed her arms, studying Helena who was still studying the painting. "Don't tell me," she said dryly, "you were the model for the woman wearing the red dress."
Helena focused on the dark-haired figure who had caught Myka's attention. Wearing a red dress as Myka had noted, though it was little more than a daub of red paint that left rounded limbs and rounded breasts exposed, the woman had been captured drawing a flower teasingly under a man's chin as she sat on his lap. "You do know these women are prostitutes, Myka," Helena replied just as dryly, arching a brow. "Once, once I sat for an artist as a favor for a friend, and everyone has me spending all my time disrobed in ateliers."
"Once, once you posed nude," Myka mockingly repeated, "and the painting's hanging in the Tate."
"What can I say?" Helena shrugged. "I was an inspiration."
Myka laughed. "What is it about this painting?"
"I've been trying to remember where I've seen the original." Helena peered at the artist's name scrawled in the corner. "He's a minor figure. It's curious to see a reproduction of it here, where you would expect to see a print by someone vastly better known, a Van Gogh or Gauguin instead. I didn't gather from their files that Afton and Bergstrom were art lovers."
"Maybe Afton got it as a gift," Myka suggested. She opened the laptop on Bergstrom's desk, then shut it. "Yesterday I still had hopes that this would be something we could keep small. But since we're now looking for anything that can do anything. . . ." Checking to see that Bergstrom's assistant was still on the phone, she said, "Sheffield wouldn't have had time to warn Bergstrom last night, but he's acting as if he knows why we're here." She closed her eyes. "What if his artefact - never mind." Blinking at Helena, she tried to marshal her thoughts. "First things first. I'll start on the other employees and see if the senior partners will voluntarily release Bergstrom's and Sheffield's computers to us, though I doubt we'll find anything on them." Helena smiled at Myka's irritation at her own need to be thorough. "Why don't you go back to Bergstrom's apartment? Maybe he's been there all along, hiding from us."
Helena glanced once more at the reproduction. She didn't know why it was tugging at her that she couldn't place where she had seen the painting. If she were Myka, she would have remembered not only where she had seen it but when, down to the hour, probably. If she were Myka - that would be quite an exercise, to imagine just how different her life would have been. One thing she knew, had she been Myka she would have cut a wide swath around one H.G. Wells. How had Claudia described her, something about a mane of hair and a Byronic appeal? Only in romances was someone that troubled reclaimed; in real life, she usually had an arrest record or a restraining order. Or she was a killer.
Helena left Myka heading back toward the senior partners' offices to commandeer a conference room for the interviews. On her cab ride to Bergstrom's apartment, she wistfully recalled how much easier it had been to break into someone's home when she was with 12. A few essential tools, a cover story at the ready, that was usually all it took. Not so now, Bergstrom's apartment was in a building monitored by a security staff and security cameras. She would have to try charm her way in, and charm was such a fickle instrument. What might win over one person would put off another, and while she more often than not charmed others into doing what she wanted, there were always a few exceptions. Like Artie. That would be all she needed, a dour little man who saw right through her.
Thankfully the man whom she had to charm her way through into Bergstrom's apartment was no Artie, although his eyebrows were almost as wildly overgrown. He found her tale believable enough - she had posed as Bergstrom's girlfriend worried that a bout of flu might have left him unable to leave his bed - to allow her to enter Bergstrom's apartment unaccompanied. It was as expensively decorated as her loft and practically as devoid of personal touches. Blue dominated the color palette rather than white and the focal point of the living room was not a bank of windows providing a spectacular view of the city - although the room had that as well as a wrap-around balcony that encouraged extended skyline viewing - but a theater-style tv. In his bedroom, which was painfully neat, she saw that one drawer hadn't been shut flush with the others and a rolled-up ball of socks had been left under the bed. Given how orderly Bergstrom appeared to be, they were the only signs that suggested he had left the apartment in a hurry.
"He's decamped," she told Myka over the phone.
"That's what I was afraid of," Myka said glumly. "The fact that he ducked the meeting we were having with him and Sheffield, that he hasn't been calling in like he usually does, that's he nowhere to be found. What if his artefact, like Sheffield's, gives him a different kind of luck? Maybe it warns him of 'bad' things before they happen."
"And we're his misfortune?" Helena asked. "I suppose, for an artefact, it would be bad luck to be neutralized, so perhaps our Mr. Bergstrom has an additional incentive for avoiding us that he's not aware of." She could visualize Myka chewing her bottom lip. "We'll find a way to work around it, we'll find him," she said as reassuringly as she could.
Myka's silence expressed her skepticism. Ending the call, Helena glanced into a spare bedroom that served as Bergstrom's office. She opened his file cabinet and desk drawers and flicked open the neatly labeled hanging files. Tax records, account statements, all date-ordered. Finding nothing of interest, Helena took the iPad from his desk and crammed it into her handbag. Just before she closed the door to his apartment, she took one last look around. The only sign that anyone lived here was the stack of mail on a kitchen counter, which mainly consisted of mail order catalogs. The apartment still smelled new, of paint and polish and fabrics just off a furniture truck, though Bergstrom had been at the address for a couple of years. The bright gleam of the appliances seemed a rebuke; surely they should have betrayed some use by now, either sporting magnets advertising pizza places or carrying a few nicks and dents. This wasn't a home, it was a way station, much as her own loft was simply another hotel room. She scattered the stack of mail along the counter. If they got to Bergstrom in time, he could always restack the catalogs, and if they didn't, whoever came to pack up his personal effects might be fooled, for a second or two, into thinking that Bergstrom actually lived here and wasn't just passing through.
Since Myka was toiling through interviews on her return, Helena occupied herself by accessing the computers in Bergstom's and Sheffield's offices. The cab ride back to the investment firm had been long enough for her to determine there was nothing relevant on Bergstrom's personal computer. She had expected to find a cache of pornography at the very least, but there was nothing of the sort. Games and some family photos, that was it. Even the sites he had visited were tame, a few online dating and NFL sites. How could someone just. . . exist like this? But of course she knew how one could inhabit a life without ever living it. She put the iPad in one of his desk drawers, shutting it with more force than necessary.
She waited for the firm's IT staff to log onto Bergstrom's and Sheffield's work computers and open programs and retrieve folders. They were earnest young men, the firm's IT support, and she suppressed the desire to elbow them out of the way and finish their work in half the time. She had learned the hard way that showing people up often made them less cooperative. When it came to Bergstrom's assistant, who fluttered in and out of his office, clearly ill at ease that Helena was sitting at his desk and looking through his files, Helena asked her to print Bergstrom's client list, although Myka already had it. And when the assistant returned with the list, asking if there was anything else, Helena put on her most ingratiating smile and sent her out for sandwiches. She wasn't terribly hungry, but that was the thing about assistants, they wanted to assist. It was why Helena no longer had any herself. When she ran out of tasks to invent for her ("Would you please bring me Mr. Bergstrom's expense statements for the past three years?" "Would you please provide me a list of his professional memberships and subscriptions?"), Helena sent her out for iced teas, using those very same statements and lists she had asked the assistant to provide as impromptu coasters for the drinks. She did her best to ignore the assistant's rolling of her eyes when she saw how the lists she had produced were being used. By the time Helena finished her first iced tea, she had completed her review of the contents of Bergstrom's work computer. Other than a horribly unfunny dirty joke that the three men shared via e-mail, there was no communication between Bergstrom, Afton, and Sheffield of a personal nature. By the time she finished her second iced tea, she was almost through with Sheffield's computer, which was also yielding nothing about the artefact. Standing up and stretching, she saw Pete cross the assistants' work areas, towing a small roller bag behind him. He stopped in the doorway to the conference room where Myka was conducting interviews.
Myka joined him, and Pete leaned in and kissed her on her cheek, saying, "Drew said to give his mom a big kiss and tell her she's supposed to get him something cool from New York." There was nothing especially intimate about how they stood together or the kiss, but their affection, though casually expressed, was unmistakable and Helena felt as she had the day of Artie's retirement party when she saw them outside the tent, that there was an ease, a rightness between them that made their divorce seem the joke, not their marriage. But as happened then, Myka saw her and stepped away from him, this time gracelessly, having to clutch at the wall to keep her balance. Pete turned his head and spotted Helena, an emotion crossing his face that seemed more like resignation than annoyance. "Drew's got something for you, too," he said, his cheerfulness having slipped for only a moment.
As Helena approached, he puckered his lips. She stopped, and he laughed at the horror of her expression. Myka gave him a shove before disappearing back into the conference room, and Pete, his laughter only slowly ebbing away, pulled a couple of pieces of folded notebook paper from his back pocket. "Seriously, he told me to give you this."
Helena pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. Myka was at one end of the table, going over the notes she had taken during the interviews. Pete left his roller bag in a corner and took a chair next to her. He craned his head to read her notes. As they talked quietly, Helena unfolded the notebook paper. Drew's handwriting, like so much of him, was a blend of his parents' styles, the letters cramped closely together, like Pete's, but written in perfect horizontal lines, like Myka's. He was setting specifications for the treehouse and asking questions. In addition to the 'lookout' as he called it, he wanted to know if she could build a captain's cabin, where he could sleep on hot summer nights. The main room would be reserved for pirate conferences about which ships to attack next and whether certain prisoners would be made to walk the plank. Which brought up the question, a line or two below, whether she would build a plank that would stick out over the branches. Could she make it so that he and his friends could play video games in the treehouse? Would it have a roof so his dad could put up hammocks? Her grin grew wider as she went down the rest of his list.
"He's over the moon about the treehouse idea," Pete said, looking up from Myka's notepad.
"It's not just an idea. You and I, we're going to build it for him," Helena said, studiously avoiding looking at Myka. "I don't know that we can implement everything on his wish list, but we'll do what we can."
"My ten thumbs and I will be at the ready to help you," he said, waggling his fingers at her. "Maybe I can find a kid-sized hard hat for him." He tilted his chair back and looked musingly at the ceiling, before turning to Myka. "He'd be so freakin' cute in it. Remember when we dressed him up like John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever for Halloween that one year? The suit, the platform shoes, the tiny pompadour?"
"We have it on video, and someday I'm going to embarrass him with it and tell him that it was your idea." Myka said, frowning at one of her notes and drawing a line through it.
"It won't matter," Pete said confidently. "I'm still his favorite." He smiled as Myka scowled. She tore a piece of paper from the pad, scrunched it into a ball, and threw it at him.
Pete fondly recalled, "Claudia was throwing a '70s-themed Halloween party, and Drew was about three. He and I both did the Saturday Night Fever thing, and Myka, she went as Farrah Fawcett. I tried to get her to wear the swimsuit, but she only went as far as the wig."
As Helena imagined what Myka would look like in an ash-blond wig with feathered hair, Myka muttered, "I wanted to go as Sabrina from Charlie's Angels."
"That was the host's pick," Pete said. Narrowing his eyes, he appraised Helena thoughtfully. "Now what '70s icon would you have gone as?"
"Darling, I'm already an icon," Helena said dismissively. Looking at Drew's list one more time before she refolded it, she said, "Who's watching him?"
"Claudia, his second favorite person after Pete," Myka said, giving him a begrudging smile. He preened playfully. Myka's phone buzzed, and she picked it up from the table. "Hey, Claud." She listened silently for a few minutes. "No, that's good to know." She fell silent again before saying, "Don't let him talk you into pizza, and no, I don't let him play Call of Duty. That's what his dad does, thinking I don't know about it." She shot Pete a glare, which he met with a look that managed to be both guilty and unapologetic. Putting the phone down, she said, "Claudia got a hit on one of Bergstrom's credit cards at an ATM."
"He knows we're tracing his credit cards, so he's trying to use cash where he can," Helena said as Myka twisted her hair back into a knot and then released it. "I've found absolutely nothing on their computers." She glanced at Pete. "You found nothing on Afton's computers or phone." As he nodded, she turned her attention back to Myka. "And, I imagine, no one you talked to ever acquired an object or heard Afton or Sheffield or Bergstrom talking about acquiring an object. Afton would have been the sole point of contact, and he would have been coached on what not to do. Not to leave any electronic traces, not to talk about the artefact where others might hear him. Sheffield told me in the restaurant, right before he collapsed, that he had been told not to attract attention."
"Helena, we know that whoever is providing the replicated artefacts understands how we work. We've been looking into the background of every agent, current and former, to see if it's one of us." Myka said.
"Aside from its employees, who's been the most interested in the Warehouse?"
"The DHS, and we've been reviewing the staff who've had the closest association with us. Congress, of course." Staring hard at Helena, she asked, "Where are you going with this?"
"Who among the members of Congress?" Helena pursued.
"Are you developing vibes in your old age?" Pete had left the table to root in the exterior compartments of his suitcase. Opening a bag of pretzels, he popped a few into his mouth.
Not vibes. Memories. The feeling on assignments that she was up against a network, not of criminals, though there were those too, but of men who were allied by money and position and, in her time, breeding. There had been a . . . clubbiness that was virtually impenetrable. Always the same slightly superior smile, no matter their age or appearance, the same claims of ignorance issued with the same air of boredom. It was beginning to feel the same with this case, and, again, the reproduction in Bergstrom's office flashed through her mind. If only she could remember where she had first seen the painting. It was important, she didn't know how she knew it, but she knew it. So maybe this was partly a vibe, after all.
"Jaffee and Perkins," Myka was saying, "but mainly Jaffee."
"Have you looked into him?"
Myka gave her an incredulous look. "Investigate a congressman? We're trying to save the Warehouse not surrender it."
"But if Claudia or this Jacqui you speak so highly of were to -"
"We would have to have evidence that Jaffee was involved before Claudia or Jane or Mrs. Frederic would ever agree to it. We can't go to them simply because we think he might be involved." Myka was shaking her head.
"Operating off a vibe from H.G. Wells?" Pete chimed in. "First, they'd have to get over the shock."
"Let's stick to something concrete," Myka said, flashing a warning look at Pete. "Bergstrom's our only real lead. We just have to find a way to sneak up on him."
"Well, there's no better place to hide than in New York." Pete spread his hands, as if to encompass the city. "And if I were him, I'd want to go someplace that had lots of people where I could lose myself and forget my troubles."
Helena's and Myka's eyes met. "Nightclubs," they said simultaneously.
"I was thinking a Yankees game," Pete said. "But nightclubs will work."
#####
Bergstrom had frequented several nightclubs, but Myka had narrowed it down to three based on how many times his credit cards had been charged at them. The first they visited was the glitziest and loudest of the three, and Helena viewed what they were wearing with dismay. They hadn't changed after leaving the investment firm, spending the early evening at a restaurant planning their next steps, so she and Myka were still wearing the suits that they had put on in the morning. Though her own suit was too conservative, Helena gave it credit for being stylish whereas Myka's battleship-gray suit . . . looked like it had been woven from steel as well. As for Pete, he was in a long-sleeved shirt and khakis. Age was no sin but dowdiness was, and more importantly, it made them stand out in all the wrong ways. It looked like they were looking for someone; three grim middle-aged parents searching for an errant child. They were lucky that half the club wasn't heading for the doors.
Pete gently nudged people out of his path toward the bar and showed one of the bartenders a picture of Bergstrom. The bartender shrugged and gestured at the dance floor, where Myka was already sidling between groups, splitting the space between couples, searching for Bergstrom. Helena walked the perimeter, glancing into occupied booths, skimming her eyes over crowded tables. Myka fell into step with her as she came off the dance floor.
"He's not here," she said, holding the sides of her jacket away from her chest, her face flushed from the heat.
"Not yet, anyway," Helena said.
"The question is, do we stay here and wait or do we try another one?" Myka twisted her head, taking in as much of the club as she could from where she was standing.
"It's not lively enough right now, if he's out," Helena responded. "He'll be looking for a place where he'll be hard to find." She took out her phone and tapped in a name. "Of the other two, my best bet is that he's here. It draws on a, ah, more louche crowd, shall we say..."
Pete poked his head over Myka's shoulder and glanced at Helena quizzically. "Loose crowd?"
"Louche," Myka repeated, smiling slyly at Helena. "A fast crowd, Pete, think of it that way."
"I get it," he said as Helena, to her consternation, began to blush. "It's where H.G. gets lucky. I'm all for checking out where she scores."
The other club was packed. They could barely edge through the door without stumbling into people milling between tables, laughing, yelling over the music. The air was close and hot, heavy with perfume. Eyes slid over the three of them without interest, although Helena knew that would change as the night wore on. This wasn't a club she visited often, although if all she wanted was someone forgettable to spend the night with, she could usually find that someone here. Her history with the club, brief though it was, rested uneasily with her tonight, and as Myka looked at her, she thought she could still see a sly smile. Helena never liked to think she was the object of someone else's amusement, but here, in this place, which seemed more anteroom than club, as if people were waiting only to be led somewhere more interesting, more private, she felt that she was being laughed at, a woman too old for everyone who trolled for sex among the young and eager like a vampire from an Anne Rice novel.
More roughly than she intended, she grabbed Myka's elbow and propelled her toward the bar. "We need to start showing Bergstrom's photo," she said, her voice tight. Myka looked uncertainly at her but didn't move out of Helena's grasp.
Most of the bartenders looked at the photo and shrugged, as they had at the first club, but one nodded and said, "Yeah, he comes in sometimes, but usually it's later than this. If you're willing to wait around, you might see him."
Myka lifted a shoulder in acquiescence, and she and Helena were able to claim a table in the shadows that gave them a view of the entrance. Pete briefly sat down with them before jumping to his feet and patrolling the dance floor. It would be difficult to isolate Bergstrom among the flow of people entering and leaving the nightclub; there were too many, and the lights were too dim. They didn't try to talk, and Helena felt no real desire to attempt a conversation; for all the shadows and pounding music, she felt exposed, as if Myka could look at her and see every time she had left the club with someone. Occasionally she could hear snatches of others' conversations as they passed by their table. They consisted of comments on the music or other people for the most part, but sometimes she heard a pick-up line, generally awful, and she could tell from the laughter whether the recipient of the offer was rejecting it or asking for something better. Watching one such hook-up successfully negotiated, the woman's laugh light and accommodating even though the man's second line had been no better than his first, she wondered, as she had when she was encouraging Sheffield's heavy-handed flirtations, if she had always looked that falsely interested, if her eyes, like the woman's, hadn't stopped searching for someone more promising even as she was accepting the overtures of the one beside her.
"You're a thousand miles away," Myka said in her ear.
"No," Helena said wryly, "I'm right here."
Sometimes Myka would spell Pete or she would, and empty glasses and bottles soon littered their table. Sparkling water and soda. She wished for something stronger to while away the boredom. The later the evening grew, the more crowded the club became until Helena became convinced she was breathing in elbows. Every time she turned, she was bumping into a knee or a shoulder, and the view of the entrance from their table became hopelessly obscured. As she passed along the dance floor, someone from a table put out a hand to stop her. The woman was laughing at something one of her friends was saying, and her smile only grew wider as she looked up at Helena. "I remember you," she said. "The woman with the white streak in her hair and the amazing mouth." Her eyes had the sheen and slightly liquid roll of someone who was a few mixed drinks' distance from being sober, but they focused on her with little difficulty. She was pretty, with brown hair and light eyes, maybe green, maybe blue. "I gave you my number, but you didn't call."
"I don't call," Helena said, edging away.
The woman sighed. "And I actually gave you my real number." But she didn't seem offended. "Are you going to be around for a while?"
"I'm here with friends," Helena said.
"That's what you said then, too. But you didn't seem to care that you were leaving them behind. In fact, I think you were feeling me up before we made it out the door. Not that I minded." She peered wonderingly up at Helena. "You honestly don't remember, do you?" She laughed good naturedly as Helena gently pushed her hand away. "If you change your mind, I'll probably still be here. Because you're better than the ones who've hit on me so far." Behind her she heard the woman saying, "We ended up at some hotel. She's a little old, but really, she does have the best mouth. . . ."
A little old. The best mouth. Better than the others. . . so far. God knows the woman could have said worse things about her, but to be summed up in such few words, and for those to be the words. Was that what she had dwindled to in her 148th year, a footnote to a sexual encounter with a woman young enough to be her great-great-great granddaughter? H.G. Wells, writer, inventor - a good (enough) lay.
"Hey, hey!" The bartender who recognized Bergstrom from the photo was waving his arms at her. Shouldering her way through people flashing fingers and money at the bartenders, Helena followed the one who had called out to her. He slid two mixed drinks to a customer, then motioned for Helena to come closer. "He was here," he shouted. "The guy you were looking for."
"He's here? Where?"
"Was here," the bartender cupped his hands around his mouth as he bent toward her ear. "He came in, and it was like he was sniffing the air or something. He got this strange look on his face and then he was fighting people to get out."
"How long ago?" Helena said, trying not to let her frustration show.
"Ten minutes or so." The bartender caught the eye of another customer. "Sorry. I gotta -" And with a shrug, he left her, grabbing a couple of pilsner glasses from underneath the bar as he sped to the next order.
When she told Myka and Pete that Bergstrom had been at the club without their knowing it, Pete groaned and pulled at his cheeks. "How the hell did he see us? I can barely see you, and you're standing right in front of me."
"I don't think he did see us. The bartender said it looked like he was sniffing the air."
"He sensed us," Myka said, pushing herself up from the table. "We were in a crowded club, and he could still sense us."
"Crafty little artefact," Helena said admiringly.
Emerging from the club, they stood on the sidewalk, breathing deeply. The air wasn't all that fresh, but it was better than what they had been breathing in the club. "I know we should come up with a new plan of attack, but I'm beat," Pete said yawning. He waved limply at a cab parked in front of the club. "Coming Mykes?" The cab inched toward him.
Myka was looking at Helena. "Are you going back to your loft?"
Not until I absolutely have to. But she didn't say that. Instead Helena said, "Not quite tired enough yet. I thought I might go somewhere I could get a decent cup of tea and review your son's extensively detailed wish list for the treehouse. I need to clear my mind for awhile of all things Bergstrom."
"Me too. Mind if I join you?"
Helena tried to hide her surprise. "Not at all," she said as offhandedly as she could.
Myka waved Pete toward the cab. He glanced from her to Helena but said only, "Don't forget, the hotel's all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet begins at six."
Helena flagged another cab and gave the driver an address in Brooklyn. It was home to a 24-hour cafe that was putatively Greek but served just about anything, including a half-decent cup of Earl Grey. Once they were seated in a booth, Myka asked for the same, and when Helena raised an eyebrow at her, she only shrugged. Opening her handbag, Helena took out Drew's list. "It'll be bigger than your house by the time I include all his add-ons."
"And worth more." Myka absently poured several teaspoons-worth of sugar from the shaker into her tea. "What kind of treehouses did you build for Christina?"
Helena had been sketching designs for Drew's treehouse on the back of one of the pieces of paper. Her pen slowed, and she remembered the cottage she had rented for them outside London. The treehouse hadn't been large, and it had been hastily built, but Christina had played in it nearly every day, pretending that it was a castle in which she was the princess. She had been six that summer, and Helena had often been gone on assignments, and her daughter's most frequent playmates had been her dolls, which she faithfully carried with her up to the treehouse. It was after that summer, when Christina's nanny had commented meaningfully on how isolated the cottage was, that Helena had decided to send her daughter to Paris in the summers. She had cousins who had children Christina's age, and they had been encouraging her for years to bring Christina for a visit.
"It was something of a miracle I was pregnant only the once," Helena said. "I didn't want a baby, and had I been pregnant with her now rather than then I would have considered aborting her." She paused, but the expression on Myka's face hadn't changed, intent, serious, and completely without judgment. "Charles thought a baby would steady me. He had always believed I was too flighty, incapable of committing myself to any one thing. I did try with her. I committed myself to her as best I could." She smiled wintrily at Myka and resumed her sketching.
"What about her father?" Myka asked softly, her eyes looking especially green in the cafe's light.
"Didn't we talk about him, long ago?"
"You told me only that he was engaged to someone else. You never told me how you felt about him, if he knew about Christina." Myka sipped her tea, and perhaps it was only the association of the color of the tea with the color of her eyes, but now Helena was convinced they were completely hazel.
"His name was Robert Croydon, and I met him on an assignment. He was," Helena considered her choice of adjectives, "interesting." She divided the treehouse she was sketching into two rooms, the smaller of them the captain's cabin Drew had requested. "That's damning with faint praise, isn't it? But it's true. I found him interesting. He was glib, like many politicians, but there was an intelligence behind the glibness and a true desire, I think, to make things better. It was no grand passion, but I liked him. Even had there been no engagement, we were far too absorbed by other things to have made a go of it. Christina was conceived in the back of a carriage, and at the climactic moment, darling, my thoughts weren't of Robert or how marvelous he made me feel - which would have been an exaggeration even in a conveyance more comfortable than the carriage - but of the artefact I was hunting." She added two sets of hooks to the cabin's ceiling, for the hammocks. "I'm sure there were fireworks above the bed and the 1812 Overture thundering at Drew's conception." She held up a hand, palm out, not looking up from her drawing. "I know, you don't kiss and tell, which in this case, I deeply appreciate. I'd rather not have any images of Pete that would strike me blind."
She felt rather than saw Myka's smile. "You never told him about Christina."
"He and his fiancee wouldn't have welcomed the news, and I felt no need to tell him. Christina was almost perfectly fatherless, which suited me and didn't seem a gross failing to her. Christina Croydon." Helena pulled in her shoulders and grimaced in distaste. "Christina Wells was much better." A plank, Drew wanted a plank. Perhaps a platform that he could stand on and pretend he was looking out at the ocean, a platform with a railing, which would prevent him from falling from the tree (which would please his parents), plus it would make the treehouse look a little bit more like a ship. "I suppose she would have asked about her father eventually, but she wasn't terribly curious about the mechanics of how she came into the world. God knows, even in the better families you could hear mothers crying out during childbirth, but the babies made their appearance discreetly, swaddled within an inch of their lives and looking like they had just been pulled from a shipping crate. Sometimes Christina would peer into my valise when I returned from an assignment, asking if I had brought her back a baby brother or sister."
She was talking too much. She had always found it too easy to talk to Myka. Putting her pen down, she eyed Myka curiously over her cup of tea. "Why are you here with me? Not that I don't enjoy it, because I do. But we were out late last night as well, and you must be exhausted."
Myka signaled to the waitress for another cup of tea. "No more than you," she countered. "And this thing with Bergstrom would've had me pacing the floor. Maybe I should have done what Claudia suggested and had her work her magic to cut off his line of credit, shut off his access to his bank account. Our lying in wait for him at the nightclub was a bust."
"Cutting off his credit might have flushed him out, yes, but it could have driven him deeper underground. This way we still have a method of tracking him."
"For how long?" Myka said gloomily. "How long before he ends up like Afton and Sheffield?" She rolled the empty cup between her hands. Abruptly she asked, "Do you have dreams about the Warehouse exploding, when we were chasing Sykes?"
"Occasionally." Myka's head was turned away from her, toward the windows that looked onto the street, and she was appearing to take a great interest in the people passing by. "Why do you ask?"
"Because I still dream about it. I see you standing outside the shield you created for us and smiling."
"I was at peace," Helena said, surprised not at the realization, which she had had long ago, but at the fact that she was admitting it.
"I wasn't," Myka said bluntly. "It was the second time I saw someone I cared about die in front of me, and I was powerless to stop it. I guess I should be thankful that I can't fully remember it because the fragments I relive in my dreams, they're agonizing enough."
"The virtues of amnesia are vastly underrated," Helena said lightly. "Quite possibly I should have concentrated on inventing something that would alter memories rather than time itself."
Myka turned her head away from the window long enough to thank the waitress for bringing her another cup of Earl Grey. Her eyes searched Helena's face before dropping to the cup. "It was worse the second time," she said quietly. She hesitated, slowly raising her eyes to Helena's, and this time Helena saw the question in them, and the only response she could think to give was "Always." But she didn't say it, it would have sounded so somber, so ridiculous in its gravity, said over the pressed wood table and the chipped china. What would she be pledging, anyway? And why would Myka ever believe her? She saw the question die in Myka's eyes, and Myka said, as if this was what she had intended to say along, "Worse because there had been a second time."
Myka drank her tea, and Helena sketched, although it was more doodling than sketching, pirate flags and cutlasses adorning the treehouse like Christmas ornaments. No boy would want something so fussily decorated. She pushed the paper away, conceding that the Berings, mother and son, flummoxed her, with their trust that she would have the answer. What if it wasn't the right answer, did they never think of that? Rubbing her neck and stretching, Helena noticed that Myka had curled up in the corner of the booth, her head resting against the wall, her eyes closed. She said under her breath, "There won't be a second time for me. I will not go through that again." A second time for something that should never have had a first time.
Second time. Of course. The alternate reality Artie had created to save the Warehouse. Old timelines surviving in dreams, fragmented, broken, but still surviving. Myka's grief, her own sense of peace, separated from their source but capable of being reexperienced. Every incursion into time, even her own failed attempts to change it, weakened the causal chain. Every artefact had its shadow double, its properties already copied, imperfectly. Gesturing wildly at their waitress, Helena asked her for paper towels, napkins, children's paper placemats, anything she could write on. And some baklava. Suddenly she was hungry.