On His Knees for His Enemy

Chapter 4: The Gardner Museum

I had a theory about galas, which was that they were war rooms in silk. Everyone present was either selling, buying, or positioning. The champagne was camouflage. The art on the walls — at the Gardner Museum, a Vermeer stolen in 1990 still marked by an empty frame like a missing tooth — was a mutual agreement to pretend we all had better things to think about than each other.

I did not have better things to think about than Nathaniel Cross.

I had arrived at precisely eight-fifteen, which was forty-five minutes late enough to be fashionable and fifteen minutes early enough to be among the first hundred guests. I knew from my dossier that Nathaniel arrived at large functions between eight-thirty and nine. He stayed ninety-one minutes on average. He did not eat the hors d'oeuvres. He did not dance.

He would walk in tonight, and he would find me already inside him without knowing it.

* * *

The Courtyard Gallery was full. I moved through the crowd in the emerald dress and with the specific stillness I had spent three years perfecting — a stillness that read, to most of the men in the room, as confidence, and to most of the women, as something they could not quite name but wanted to study. A string quartet was playing Debussy. The flower arrangements were too many, too white, too insistent. I took a glass of champagne I did not intend to drink, and I began to move.

In my first twelve minutes, I identified: Victor Hale, CFO of Cross Corporation, standing near the bar with a woman I knew to be his wife, Dr. Amara Hale. Marcus Cross, in the far corner, holding court with three men in nearly identical charcoal suits. Elena Cross, by the Titian, drinking something that was almost certainly not champagne and speaking to no one.

I did not approach any of them. I waited.

At eight forty-seven, the room's weight shifted. I did not see him enter. I felt it — the way conversations did not stop but slowed, the way the bartender straightened his jacket without knowing why, the way a certain kind of expensive attention redirected itself along a sightline I could trace. I turned, carefully.

Nathaniel Cross was standing in the doorway.

Every photograph I had studied had lied in a small way. They had shown me a tall man in a dark suit. They had not shown me what it was to see him stand still in a room and watch the room adjust around him. He was taller than I had prepared for, which was the first lie. He was more contained than I had prepared for, which was the second. And the third — the one I had not prepared for at all, the one no dossier could have told me — was that when he scanned the room, slowly, the way a man reads a contract, his attention did not flicker. He saw. And whatever he saw, he filed.

I felt my body respond before my mind could override it.

I pressed the cold champagne glass briefly against my wrist, and I filed that response, too.

* * *

Victor Hale found me twenty minutes later. I had positioned myself near the bar, because I had known, from the dossier, that Nathaniel would order a Lagavulin 16 within thirty minutes of arrival. The bartender had already begun pouring it. I was standing three feet from that pour.

"Miss Kenzari."

I turned. Victor was smiling. He had a specific smile — warm at the mouth, watchful at the eyes. "Mr. Hale."

"Victor, please. You pitched my office last week. I don't think we should still be formal."

"Victor, then."

"I'd like to introduce you to someone." He gestured, and Nathaniel Cross crossed the last ten feet between us with the unhurried rhythm of a man who did not walk anywhere he had not decided to walk.

"Nathaniel," Victor said, "this is Aria Kenzari. I think you'll be interested to meet her."

Nathaniel Cross turned his head. He did not look me up and down. He looked at my eyes, and held them for exactly one and a half seconds longer than was socially required.

"Miss Kenzari."

"Mr. Cross."

His voice was lower than it was in the recorded interviews. Stripped of the social register, it sat somewhere at the base of a sentence like the keel of a boat.

"Victor tells me you closed the Harbor Capital file."

"I closed it. They paid for the closing."

His mouth did not smile, but something beneath it shifted. "An aggressive structure, I heard."

"I find indecision an expensive habit to indulge in my clients," I said. "I try not to subsidize it."

He looked at me. I looked back.

"I will remember that, Miss Kenzari."

"I hope so, Mr. Cross."

The bartender slid the Lagavulin across the counter. Nathaniel picked it up without looking. Victor, who had clearly intended to linger, saw something in the air between us and did not.

"Enjoy your evening, Miss Kenzari," Victor said, and drifted.

Nathaniel did not drift.

* * *

He held his glass. He did not sip it.

"You funded this evening," he said. It was not a question.

"I made a donation. I believe it supports a new acquisition."

"The Sargent."

"Yes."

"A woman named Aria Kenzari," he said slowly, "who runs an M&A boutique, gives fifty thousand dollars to the Gardner Museum three weeks before she pitches my firm on a shipping acquisition."

He paused. He let the sentence sit.

"I am trying to decide," he said, "whether this is a coincidence."

I allowed a beat. Two. "Mr. Cross. If I had intended to purchase a meeting with you, I would have bought the meeting. I would not have spent fifty thousand dollars on a Sargent and then waited for a chance encounter in front of a missing Vermeer."

"Why not?"

"Because chance encounters are amateur."

For the first time, he smiled. It was not much of a smile — the left corner of his mouth, no more. It lasted less than a second. But when it passed, his eyes did not leave me, and I understood, with a clarity that ran very cold down the inside of my spine, that he had just decided something about me.

I did not know what.

I was going to find out.

* * *

I stayed ninety-two minutes. Exactly one minute longer than his average. He watched me leave from the far side of the courtyard; I did not look back, but I felt the watching, and I let it be felt.

The cab pulled onto the Mass Pike. The city slid past, and I realized I had been holding my champagne glass the entire ride, still full, still untouched. I rolled the stem between my fingers. The glass had grown warm from my hand.

I had prepared for his intelligence. I had prepared for his cruelty. I had prepared for his network, his lawyers, his family, his secrets.

What I had not prepared for was that he would look at me like a question he intended to answer.

I pressed the button to lower the window and let the cold air in. I needed it. I needed all of it.

This was going to be harder than I had planned.