On His Knees for His Enemy

Chapter 5: Elena's First Appearance

Isabella Stewart Gardner had been dead for a hundred years and was still, in my opinion, running her museum. Her will specified that nothing in the house could be moved or altered or removed. If something were taken — she had said, and her executors had obeyed — the empty space it left must remain empty. Which was why the walls of the Dutch Room still held four gold-leafed frames around nothing.

I was looking at one of those empty frames, the Vermeer that had never come home, when a voice behind me said, "I always find those more beautiful than the paintings that were stolen."

I turned, carefully. I had heard the voice before. I had studied it in interviews, in charity speech clips, in a wedding toast recorded in 2001 that I had watched seventeen times. I had, in fact, spent five years assuming I would know what to do when I first heard Elena Cross say my name.

Elena Cross was standing three feet from me, holding a glass of something that was certainly not champagne.

"Mrs. Cross."

"Miss Kenzari. I saw you across the room. I thought I should introduce myself, since my husband and my son appear to have forgotten their manners tonight."

"They haven't forgotten. We've met."

"Yes." Her smile was small, precise. "I know."

* * *

She was in her late fifties, trim in the way women of her generation stayed trim — through inheritance and discipline and a quiet refusal to eat anything interesting. Her hair was a pale, expensive blonde, cut in a bob that looked casual but almost certainly required appointments every three weeks. She was wearing pearls the size of a small clenched fist. She smelled of Chanel No. 5, and that was the first thing that undid me, because my mother had worn Chanel No. 5 for twenty-two years, and I had not prepared for the possibility of a woman who had known my mother to smell the same.

I did not react to the scent. I had trained myself not to react to scents. But Elena Cross was watching me the way people watched weather — not for the obvious storm, but for the way the air was moving.

"Because of what they suggest?" I offered, turning back to the empty frame. "The paintings, I mean."

"Because of what they refuse," said Elena Cross. "Isabella said: if you cannot have this, you cannot have anything in its place. I find that kind of stubbornness quite moving, don't you?"

"Yes," I said, before I could think about whether I should.

Her smile deepened, a fraction.

We began to walk. She did not ask if I wanted to walk with her; she simply began, and I followed, because to do otherwise would have looked rude, and because rudeness was a tell I did not plan to give her.

* * *

"Kenzari," she said. "An unusual name. Is it European?"

"My father's side. Croatian originally, anglicized generations ago."

"Ah. And your mother?"

"She died when I was young."

Elena's eyes did not change, but her voice softened by an increment I only caught because I had been studying her. "I'm sorry. That's a particular kind of orphaning, isn't it? Losing a mother before you know how to miss her properly."

"I knew how to miss her," I said. "I just ran out of time to practice."

"Did you, indeed."

There was a pause. It was not uncomfortable. It was the kind of pause people took when they were deciding whether to say the next thing. She did not say the next thing. Not yet.

Instead, she reached out and touched my arm — briefly, lightly, the way one would touch the sleeve of someone one had mistaken for an old friend.

"You have a way of standing," she said, "that I recognize. But I cannot remember from where."

For the length of one heartbeat, I forgot to breathe.

"Boston is a small town," I said, recovering. "I'm sure we've crossed paths."

"Boston is not a small town, dear. It is a very small circle inside a much larger city. It's an important distinction."

She let her hand drop.

* * *

We walked another half a lap around the Dutch Room. She asked me about my firm. I answered with the rehearsed language of a woman who had spent three years building a cover she was now glad she had built carefully. She asked me where I had gone to school. I said Wellesley for undergraduate, Wharton for my MBA. She asked which year.

I answered. She nodded. She did not write anything down. She did not need to.

At the threshold of the room, she opened her small Hermès bag and extracted a card. She handed it to me. It was heavy, cream-colored, engraved — not printed — with her name in a font that had existed before computers.

"You should come for afternoon tea, Miss Kenzari. I find you interesting, which is rare at my age."

"That's a generous assessment, Mrs. Cross."

"Saturday. Three o'clock. Beacon Hill. I'll send the address to the number you used for the donation tonight."

"You have my number."

She smiled, for the first time — really smiled, with the corners of her eyes. It was a small, beautiful smile that did not commit her to anything.

"Oh, dear. I have everyone's number. That's not a challenge. That's the nature of this town."

She left me at the doorway. She walked back into the crowd the way a woman walked back into a room she had designed. I watched her shoulders disappear among the black dresses. I realized I was still holding the card.

* * *

Outside the museum, while I waited for the car, I sent Daniel a text.

"Recompute. Elena Cross variable. I did not anticipate."

He responded in thirty seconds. "Be careful. She's smarter than the dossier."

I stared at his message. I knew. I also knew I was going to go to tea on Saturday.

In the car, I turned the cream-colored card between my fingers.

Elena A. Cross. Beacon Hill.

The card was heavy. The paper was old. This was not a woman who kept modern business cards; this was a woman who had her stationery engraved at the same shop her grandmother had used. I had underestimated her. I had spent five years underestimating her. She had been, in the dossier, a footnote — the wife, the socialite, the alcoholic they joked about at club lunches.

The dossier, it occurred to me now, had been written by men.

My phone buzzed. The address had arrived. Saturday. Three o'clock.

I didn't sleep that night.