“Oh, yes. Also owned briefly by Princess Diana. Look.” Selma gestured to the left of the pedestal, where a leather portfolio displayed two photographs of both famed beauties wearing the necklace. This is the way to shop, Anna thought, sipping her crisp, ice-cold champagne.
“Hey, Selma?”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Could you process the refund on the bracelet, give me a check for the full amount we have on credit, and put the lariat—I mean sautoir—on Mrs. Von Bizmark’s Amex?” Rewards points! Anna thought. Selma was happy to oblige, and it was only back in the car with the necklace and the check on her way to the opera that she peered at the number: $4,703,425.63.
Oh, shit. Ten minutes before she had been nervous to courier a $500,000 bracelet. Now she had a check and a necklace valued together at nearly $10 million on her person. And every single dollar of it was uninsured. She clutched the slim rope handle of the bag with a sweaty hand and thought about taping everything to her body somehow, but she had no tape and no time because the car was already pulling up at Lincoln Center.
Anna held the bag with both hands like a lunatic all the way across the plaza and past the fountain, through the revolving doors into the lobby, down the main staircase, through the gold double doors, down the red-velvet aisles, and to the stage, where Giselle impatiently tapped her foot—somehow imbuing this ordinary gesture with grace and a whiff of sexiness—while looking at her phone. A nearby twentysomething guy in work boots and a tool belt silently awaited her instructions.
All Anna’s pieces sat on the floor in their respective spots, awaiting her “artistic eye.” It was . . . no, it should have been one of the most exciting creative professional moments of her life, but instead, all Anna could think about was what to do with the goddamn Harry Winston shopping bag crushed within her white-knuckled fingers.
She climbed up onto the stage. “Are you OK?” Giselle asked but clearly had no interest in the answer. “This is Mike. Tell him where you want everything.” Anna wrapped the shopping bag handles around her wrist and worked her way across the stage with Mike, hanging first the largest, most important piece—Julie’s black-and-white lips—in the center of the backdrop. Then the two other large pieces went on either side, and two smaller pieces were centered alongside the big ones toward the edge of the backdrop, and so forth. When completed, it was a visually exciting and harmonious set, if Anna did say so herself. She happily noted how at home her work looked there, in a replica of Coolwater’s great room.
The one snag was that a doorway cut into where the thirteenth and final piece should have hung. It was an old one, from when Anna had first met Adrian and before they were dating heavily enough to really put a dent in her time for painting. Underneath one of the orange decal circles hid a pressed feather from Adrian’s old pillow. She had finished this one quickly, wanting to complete something so she could take a bit of an absence from her work. But still, something about it captured the joy of that particular time. A breathless quality that perhaps would not have come through on stage anyway.
“I’ll just put it in Opal’s office for now. She likes this one,” Giselle said, lifting her eyes from her phone and darting them at the piece. Then she actually looked Anna in the eye for a flash. “Really,” she said with sincerity. What an unexpected . . . , Anna thought, but then Giselle turned her back and strode off, as if on stilts. “Allons-y, Mike.” He dutifully carried the small painting for her.
Anna stood on the stage, hugging the shopping bag so she could finally put it out of her mind and instead focus on the fact that her work—her real work—was up on Lincoln Center’s main stage. It was something to be celebrated. Woo-hoo, she said to herself. She snapped a picture. Though her fingers itched to send it to Adrian, she sent it to Lindsay instead, who instantly responded with a series of WOWs, applause emojis, and happy tears.
Back in the car, Anna thought of the short distance between now and the end of this long hard slog. Maybe, it dimly occurred to her, all the stress had something to do with her blowup with Adrian. Soon she would return to three days at work, three days at the studio. Just a normal schedule would feel like a vacation. She suddenly missed Adrian so badly; thank God the ball was that evening. The next day, Anna would call him. She knew she owed him an apology, and she was almost ready to deliver it.
She checked the time: Mrs. Von Bizmark should be finishing up glam for the late-afternoon press junket at the opera. At least as far as work was concerned, everything seemed, for just that moment, perfectly, well, perfect: all the pieces moving in the right direction. Anna got out of the car after signing for a generous forty-dollar tip on the Von Bizmark Organization because, why not? Live a little.
As soon as Joe the doorman spotted Anna, he shooed her inside with his white-gloved hand. “Come on, come on,” he said under his breath. He raced ahead of her to call the elevator, all the while wheeling one hand like he had a tic. Anna noted that today was one of the rare days when the front doors had been thrown open to the perfect weather outside. Anna tilted her head at him and hesitated at the open elevator door.
“You better get upstairs!” he said.
“What’s going on?” she asked as he gently shoved her onto the elevator.
“Just go! They need you up there!” he said as the elevator door slowly closed, and she was left alone inside.
Genuine urgency occurred in the Von Bizmark world only when a complication went beyond what money could fix and into the realm of actual human problems. Someone upstairs was hurt, dead, missing, or arrested. Anna’s mind started clicking through gears, downshifting, her vision narrowing onto the hand-carved etching of a maple leaf in the elevator’s mahogany molding. What could have happened? Mr. Von Bizmark—heart attack. Mrs. Von Bizmark—stroke. Some sort of criminal investigation?
It felt like a three-hour journey to the eighth floor. The door finally moved at half its usual speed. Both foyer doors stood wide open like the old days. An unknown young woman in a suit and heels zipped past the vestibule on her way to the living room, holding a sheaf of papers. Inside, Anna heard the buzz of people talking, typing. A sob. Who was that? Mrs. Von Bizmark?
Coming through the doorway was like leaving her real life behind and emerging onto a movie set. Anna stepped carefully over a foot-thick bundle of black cables running through the foyer, stuck with duct tape onto the hand-painted floor, all the way into the living room. She followed them with her eyes into what could only be described as a war room. A half dozen sixtysomething dark suits commanded the crowded space. Their efficient motions, dead seriousness, and excessively tidy hairstyles gave them away as the former military officers who comprised the highest rank of the VBO personal security service.
Each of these commander types directed several staffers, who circled them like flies around a large piece of meat, this one jabbering away on the phone, that one hammering on a laptop, another menacing a document with a highlighter. Large folding tables held computers, phone-monitoring devices, printers, scanners, and other unidentifiable investigative gadgets. A few data crunchers occupied their own space by a far window at three computers, intently scrolling, occasionally scribbling notes, clearly analyzing some immense amount of information.
Seeing Anna standing there, stunned, in the doorway, Julie rushed to fill her in. Peony had had a half day at school and had been home for lunch. Around 12:30 p.m., Nanny had gone to the bathroom for three minutes—she was sick and had taken longer than usual. When she’d come out, Peony was gone. That was it. No note. Nothing on any of the seven video cameras downstairs. Nowhere in the house. Nowhere in the building. The apartment had been on lockdown all afternoon; no one could leave or communicate with anyone outside.