No, this piece of advice—You have to know what you want, or you’ll never get it—was given to Declan by a senator from Nevada he’d met during a DC field trip back in eighth grade. The other children had been bored by the pale stone restraint of the city and the sameness of the law and government offices they toured. Declan, however, had been fascinated. He’d asked the senator what advice he had for those looking to get into politics.
“Come from money,” the senator had said first, and then when all the eighth graders and their teachers had stared without laughing, he added, “You have to know what you want, or you’ll never get it. Make goals.”
Declan made goals. The goal was DC. The goal was politics. The goal was structure, and more structure, and yet more structure. He took AP classes on political science and policy. When he traveled with his father to black markets, he wrote papers. When he took calls from gangsters and shady antique auction houses, he arranged drop-offs near DC and wrangled meetings with HR people. Aglionby Academy made calls and pulled strings; he got names, numbers, internships. All was going according to plan. His father inconveniently got murdered, but Declan pressed on. His father’s will conveniently left him a town house adjacent to DC. Declan pressed on. He kept his brothers alive; he graduated; he moved to DC.
He made the goal, he went toward the goal.
When he took his first lunch meeting with his new boss, he found himself filled with the same anticipation he’d had as an eighth grader. This was the place, he thought, where things happened. Just across the road was the Mexican embassy. Behind him was the IMF. GW Law School was a block away. The White House, the USPS, the Red Cross, all within a stone’s throw.
This was before he understood there was no making it for him. He came from money, yeah, but the wrong kind of money. Niall Lynch’s clout was not relevant in this daylight world; he only had status in the night. And one could not rise above that while remaining invisible to protect one’s dangerous brother.
On that first day of work, Declan walked into the Renwick Gallery and stood inside an installation that had taken over the second floor around the grand staircase. Tens of thousands of black threads had been installed at points all along the ceiling, tangling around the Villareal LED sculpture that normally lit the room, snarling the railing over the stairs, blocking out the light from the tall arches that bordered the walls, turning the walkways into dark, confusing rabbit tunnels. Museumgoers had to pick their way through with caution lest they be snared and bring the entire world down with them.
He had, bizarrely, felt tears burning the corners of his eyes.
Before that, he hadn’t understood that his goals and what he wanted might not be the same thing.
This was where he’d found art.
Declan stood in the small Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, looking at John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo. The dim room, the so-called Spanish Cloister, was long and skinny. The walls were colorful with complicated Mexican tiles and lined with stone fountains and basins. El Jaleo was the only painting in the room, hung in a shallow alcove framed by a Moorish arch. Antique pots rested around its base, tricking the viewer into believing themselves part of the scene in the painting. A cunning mirror stole light from the hall and threw it subtly on the canvas. Gardner had renovated this room especially for El Jaleo, and every part of it was an extension of the painting’s mood.
The larger a piece of art was, the farther away one was generally meant to stand from it, so Declan was not directly in front of the canvas but rather standing four yards off. He was just looking at it. He had been looking at it for ten minutes. He would probably look at it for another ten minutes.
A tear prickled his eye.
“A man in Florence once had a heart attack when he saw the Birth of Venus, if you can believe it,” said a voice beside him. “Palpitations are more common, though. That’s what Stendhal had. Couldn’t walk, he reported, after seeing a particularly moving work of art. And Jung! Jung decided it was too dangerous to visit Pompeii in his old age because the feeling—the feeling of all that art and history round him, it might kill him. Jerusalem … Tourists in Jerusalem sometimes wrap themselves in hotel bedsheets. To become works of art themselves, you know? Part of history. A collective unconscious toga party. One lady in the holy city decided she was giving birth to God’s son. She wasn’t even pregnant, before you ask. Funny what art will do to you. Stendhal Syndrome, they call it, after our lad with the palpitations, though I prefer its more modern name: Declan Lynch.”
“Hello, Jordan,” Declan said.
He stood there for a space with Jordan Hennessy, both of them looking at the painting. El Jaleo was both dark and luminous. In it, a Spanish dancer twisted through a dark room. Behind her, guitarists twisted round their instruments and onlookers clapped her on. It was all black and brown except for the striking white of the dancer and the flushed red in details. In person it was obvious how much rigor had been put into the contorted dancer and how little had been devoted to the musicians and the background, forcing the viewer’s attention onto her, only her. The entire work looked effortless, if one didn’t know better. (Declan knew better.)
“You’re my prospective punter, aren’t you?” Jordan asked. “I should have known. Mr. Pozzi of South Boston.”
Declan said, “How do you find a forger? Be in the market for a forgery.”
“Pozzi’s on the nose, don’t you think?”
Samuel-Jean Pozzi was the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s most dramatic portraits, a full-length glory featuring his friend Dr. Pozzi, a well-known dandy and OB-GYN, in a blazing red dressing gown. Declan had feared using it as a name when contacting Jordan for a forgery might give the game away, but the potential reward of looking clever was too great a temptation.
“You didn’t guess it, did you?” Declan lifted his red scarf from his collar. “I’m wearing this scarf in his honor.”
“Cadmium red,” Jordan said. “Slightly toxic but little risk if handled well. Before I forget—”
She handed him the keys to his stolen car.
“Did you remember it takes premium?”
“Crumbs, I knew I forgot something. I did top up the wiper fluid.”
“Where is it?”
“A lady never tells.” She grinned at him. Then she stepped as close to the painting as she was permitted, bending at the waist to study the brushstrokes, graceful as one of Degas’s dancers. Her grin tugged wider as she guessed, correctly, that he was looking at her. Straightening, she lifted her arm and twisted her body, pulling herself into a perfect imitation of El Jaleo’s dancer. There was nothing like the sound of a museum, and the Gardner was no exception. The murmur of other patrons in the adjacent courtyard, the sound of footsteps echoing in hallways, the respectful whispers. Jordan Hennessy was art in front of art in a room that was art in a building that was art in a life that was art, and Declan told himself he had only come here to get his car back.
Foolish Declan smirked; Paranoid Declan sneered.
Paranoid Declan lost. Foolish Declan said, in an even tone, “You never finished my portrait. Seems unprofessional to just leave a client hanging like that.”
Jordan nodded. “And now you want a refund.”