The Hollow Ones(66)

“And could that be Agent Solomon?”

Blackwood looked at her, seeing if she was proud of herself. “A friend at the FBI,” she explained. “Did you pose for many portraits back in your day?”

She brought up an Elizabethan-era painting of a man wearing a high collar and robe, standing by a high desk. “This painting was recovered from Nazi pillaging more than a decade ago, and is now in cold storage at the National Portrait Gallery in London.” She held the phone near his face. “A pretty good likeness.”

“Why, thank you,” he said flatly.

“Here’s one I did not see coming. I would never, ever have pegged you as a Disney fan. Mind truly blown.” The photograph showed groups of people gathered festively around a smiling Mickey Mouse face formed out of planted flowers. She zoomed in past some primitive-looking character costumes and a young Ronald Reagan, finding Walt Disney standing behind a microphone stand. One row behind him, not five people away, stood a trim man wearing a dark suit. He wasn’t smiling, but appeared to be the only one in the photograph looking at the camera.

“July seventeenth, 1955. Must have been a tough ticket.”

“You are having fun, aren’t you.”

“Not really. Just smiling instead of screaming. These aren’t Photoshopped photographs.”

“I know.”

“And this is just what turned up—probably by mistake. Because who else would label you in photographs, except maybe Solomon?”

“I imagine that is correct.”

Odessa’s phone screen timed out, going dark. She said, “I gave a teacup, the one you drank out of at my apartment, to the Bureau lab. The cup wasn’t washed, never cleaned. I handle evidence all the time. How is it there were no fingerprints on the cup?”

Hugo Blackwood shrugged.

“They disappeared? Faded somehow?”

He showed her his fingertips, which contained the usual whorls and ridges. He rubbed his thumbs against them. “You tell me.”

“Your name appears on a variety of property deeds worldwide. That doesn’t include undigitized ledgers or many international transactions that occurred pre–Nine Eleven. It suggests vast holdings, and a substantial net worth, but one impossible to approximate. Because of aliases and does-business-as’s, and old titles tangled up in renamed villages and provinces, it appears money is always moving behind you.”

Blackwood nodded as though pretending to hear this for the first time.

She went back to her phone. “Here’s one. Lorraine, 1914.” It showed World War I soldiers standing in trenches, looking exhaustedly at the photographer. In the background, drinking from a tin cup, was the Brit in the dark suit.

“I remember that cup of tea,” he said. “Wretched brew.”

Odessa put away her phone, having had enough of her own games. “I’m willing to bet that a comprehensive archive of photographs and paintings would put you at or near every major world event over the past four and a half centuries. All for so-called occult investigations?”

“You would be surprised.”

She looked at him standing there before her. He was just a man. And yet he was not. “You like tea,” she said. “So do you eat?”

“When I am hungry,” he said.

“Where do you sleep?”

“In a bed.”

“How did you get so wealthy?”

“Are you familiar with the phenomenon of compound interest?”

She nodded. That part made sense. “So are you…immortal?”

“I hope not.”

“You want to die.”

Blackwood looked out the window.

She pressed him. “Can you be hurt? Wounded? Shouldn’t a four-hundred-year-old man have scars and cuts over time?”

“I experience pain, certainly. I don’t know what you mean by wounds. I am an occult detective, not a gunfighter.”

“But—you cannot die.”

Blackwood sighed. “How about if you tell me something about you?”

Odessa was taken aback. “Me? Compared with you? Let’s see. I’m not very good at Scrabble…”

“Tell me about your father.”

“My father?”

“At the botanica, the old woman who gave you the reading. She asked if you wanted to know about your father.”

Odessa went cold. “And I didn’t, did I.”

“You didn’t want her to tell you anything,” said Blackwood. “That doesn’t mean you didn’t want to know.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I need to know your weaknesses,” said Blackwood. “It is good to know where the seams are. Weaknesses can be exploited.”

“By these Hollow Ones?”

“By any aggressive, malevolent spirit. That is how they work. That is what they feast upon.”

Odessa shook her head, backing into the padded chair below the silent television. “It’s not a weakness. I made it a strength.”

“Did you?” said Blackwood.

She knew he was baiting her. It didn’t matter. Something inside her wanted him to know what happened.

“My father was a lawyer in the small town I grew up in. He had an office for years next door to the library in an old converted farmhouse. A real family practice, like a doctor. He always had butterscotch candy in a jar on his desk when I’d come by. He had this ancient secretary named Polly, worked there forever. I was the youngest, his last child. We were close.