The look on the man’s face was clear. He wanted to kill Nash.
That’s okay, the feeling’s mutual. And after I kill your boss, I’ll do you next.
He turned back around to find one of Steers’s female attendants standing there. Then he realized he was not on the penthouse floor.
“This way, Mr. Hope,” she said, her gaze downcast.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“This way, please.”
He followed her down a hall, and she stopped at a large, intricately carved wooden door.
The attendant knocked, and Nash could hear Steers say to come in. The attendant opened the door, bowed, motioned Nash through, and closed the door after him.
Nash looked around and felt like he was in a top-tier museum, with walls so tall he knew two floors of the building had been combined to created the extra height. The windows were all covered with shades to prevent sunlight coming in. The artwork hanging on the walls ranged from Renaissance to Baroque periods to more abstract Jackson Pollock–style themes. Nash knew this because his wife, Judith, had minored in art history in college. In helping her to study for exams he had learned a fair bit about that world.
Steers was standing near the far wall. She was dressed, as always, in black. Her hair hung straight down. She was not looking at Nash, but at a massive painting hanging in front of her.
“You asked to see me?” said Nash stiffly. After finding Maggie’s belongings in the box, Nash was finding it hard to stay civil in front of the woman. He eyed a small statuette on a pedestal that he could use to bludgeon her. That might be better than his noisy gun, actually. It would give him and Thura time to make a run for it. He edged closer to it.
She turned to him and his look must have made her curious because she said, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“My mother is treating you well?”
“No complaints.”
“She can be. . .difficult.”
“It’s all good,” he replied in a tight voice.
She cocked her head, clearly still perplexed by his brusque manner.
Not wanting her to focus on this he looked around and said, “I feel like I’m at the Met or the Louvre.”
“Have you been to those places?”
“Guarding clients, yes,” he lied, but he had gone to those places as a tourist.
“Do you enjoy art?”
“I know what I like.” While he recognized many of the paintings on the wall he didn’t want to say so, because Steers might know that his wife knew about art, and she might eventually make the connection despite his vastly altered physical appearance. He pointed at a foreboding painting of a group of men in seventeenth-century garb gathered around a table. “Most people would know that’s a Rembrandt. And next to it, I think, is a Warhol,” he added, indicating a silkscreened print depicting stacked Brillo boxes. He stopped and looked at one painting consisting of colorful loops and polka dots. “But I don’t know that artist.”
“Yayoi Kusama. She is Japanese. She’s now very old, but still at work, I believe.”
He studied her, putting aside for the moment his plan to kill the woman. “Hiroko told me about your artwork, and that you have a studio here. I saw the drawings you did of her. They were really good.”
Steers looked embarrassed by his praise. “It allows me time. . .away from other things.”
Also in her expression he saw, for the first time, an infinite. . .sadnesswas the word he was looking for. It was actually quite startling to him because the woman always seemed to be in steadfast control of her emotions. He glanced once more at the statuette. Yet now Nash reasoned that it would be unfair to Thura for Nash to kill Steers and then force Thura to flee with him as well, with the most likely result that both men would be killed by Steers’s guards.
Damn.
Nash refocused and then gazed at the painting she was standing in front of. It was quite large in scope, a full fifteen-by-fifteen feet, he estimated. It was literally bursting with shapes, images, colors, an amalgamation of concentrated power and fluid whimsy, but somehow still compellingly disciplined in its composition and execution.
“I don’t know that artist, either,” he said.