The Cloisters(82)
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll be back soon.”
I waited until I saw her long, swaying ponytail enter the park for a second time before I pulled out my phone and texted Leo. We need to talk, call me when you get out. Then I promptly deleted the text from my phone and my computer, erasing any record Rachel could find.
The apartment was quiet, normal. Filled with books and kitchen utensils, expensive cashmere throws that were neatly folded on the backs of couches. I began to pull open the drawers in the kitchen—place mats and napkins, cutting knives and wine openers—moving methodically until I found what I was looking for: a drawer of bric-a-brac, Scotch tape and scissors, small screwdrivers and mostly used notepads. I felt around until I heard it, the jangle of metal on metal, a gold ring with countless keys on it. There had to be at least fifteen.
I took the ring and made my way into the hall to summon the elevator, worried as I watched it tick up from the ground level, floor by floor, that Rachel might be on it. When the elevator finally arrived, it was empty. I held the door open with my foot so no one else in the building could summon it and began to try the keys in the slot for the penthouse. The fifth one I tried clicked into place, and the button for the sixteenth floor illuminated.
When the elevator came to a stop, it opened directly into her parents’ apartment, revealing a long, prewar hallway lined with paintings and drawings in gilt frames. I recognized several right away. There was a Matisse drawing from the first half of his career, an eighteenth-century Quentin de la Tour pastel, a Canaletto with views of Venice. At the end of the hallway was a two-story living room with floor-to-ceiling windows obscured by thick linen curtains, pulled perpetually against the sun. I turned on a blue-and-white chinoiserie lamp.
On tables around the room, photographs of Rachel and her parents were arrayed in sterling silver frames: photos of them sailing in the Mediterranean and her in her tennis uniform for the Spence team. There were photos of her mother and father with heads of state and at museum trustee dinners. Photos from Aspen and the Hamptons, and older family photos, from Long Lake with her grandparents on the veranda.
And then there were books, rows and rows of books, bound in leather with gold-leaf lettering—first editions, erudite pamphlets, rare manuscripts—as well as delicately upholstered couches covered with tassled pillows. I walked down another hallway, checking each bedroom until I found Rachel’s.
It was tasteful and not overly big, painted pistachio green with a large sleigh bed. Rachel had her own framed photographs, and I peered curiously at the photos of her in high school, alone on the bow of a sailboat, reading on a chaise longue somewhere on the Adriatic coast. But mostly there were engravings. Rachel’s bedroom was full of framed copper engravings from the sixteenth century, as well as a handful of framed medieval manuscript pages. I lingered over a few before making my way to her desk and pulling open the drawers.
Mostly, they had been stripped clean. Only a few old ballpoint pens and a blank notebook remained. There were a handful of quarters in her top drawer and bits of detritus that tended to gather in childhood bedrooms: specks of candy wrappers and an abandoned earring. I imagined she hadn’t slept in here in years. But the bottom drawer of her desk was locked, and while I checked the other drawers for a key, it struck me that the key ring in my hand might have the solution. After a few failed efforts, one key fit the lock, and I pulled open the drawer.
Inside were two things: a photo of a small sailboat, the name of which read Fortuna, and a carved disk brooch, expertly inlaid with green stones and pearls, a cameo at its center. I recognized it instantly from the document Michelle de Forte had circulated containing images and descriptions of each missing item stolen by Leo.
As I fingered its familiar gold filigree edges, I was reminded of a Roman proverb Virgil had popularized in The Aeneid: audentes fortuna juvat, or, fortune favors the bold. Rachel, alongside Leo it seemed, had been very bold indeed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The offer came from Michelle via email three days later, asking me if I would stay on at The Cloisters indefinitely. The pay would be substantially more than I had been making, and they would offer me a title change to assistant curator immediately, which was ironic, considering there was still no one to assist in the main office. I kept the news to myself, reading and rereading Michelle’s email until I had memorized every comma, every question mark.
Meanwhile, the crowd of visitors and last heat of summer had built to a crescendo. August saw a spike in tourists sticking to the galleries and fanning themselves with museum maps, their spent bodies slumped on stone benches, deflated and streaked with sweat. The staff felt the same. Docents had grown tired of the buses of fussy camp kids that continued to arrive, and the private concierge tour guides who usurped their position. We were tired of weaving our bodies through crowds of visitors to reach our offices and bathrooms, of the stress the volume of bodies put on the insufficient air-conditioning system. With every day that passed—sticky and thick and slow—September inched closer, even if it felt a world away.
There had been no word from Leo yet, but Rachel had gone up to Cambridge to ready her apartment for the fall semester, which began the first week of September. She’d tried to bring up the topic of me staying in her apartment, but I’d been avoiding it since finding the brooch. Instead, I’d quietly scheduled showings at the few apartments I could afford. None of them much larger than my sublet, but all of them a year-long lease.