“You’ll pay me twenty thousand for a few dozen sheets of paper?” Bridgette weighed the folio in her hands. “What is this, original Shakespeare?”
“Hardly,” said Helen coolly. “But it happens to fit within my area of expertise. I am about to retire, and I’ve no children and no heirs, and so I can do whatever rot I wish with my hard-earned money. And as my parting shot, I would like to publish something about those documents you’re currently holding in your hands. It so happens that I’ve been treated with somewhat less respect by my colleagues than I feel my talents merit, and I would very much like to right that impression.” She leveled a stare at Bridgette. “Given your own experience of Jonathan Martin, I imagine you can understand my wish to go out, as they say, with a bang?”
Bridgette snorted, but Aaron saw that she’d softened her grip on the folder.
“I’ll go to get a bank check, then.” Helen started for the door.
“What, right this minute?”
Bridgette stood in the only clear path across the closet, blocking Helen’s way. Slowly Helen walked forward, leaning hard on her cane. She didn’t stop until the two women stood mere inches apart. “Yes,” Helen said quietly. “I’m not getting any younger. Are you?”
Bridgette flinched.
“There’s a branch of Barclays down the hill,” she said drily. She stepped backward a few paces, and watched Helen make her way out of the room.
For an instant Bridgette didn’t seem to have registered that she was alone in the room with Aaron. But when she did, he knew he’d catch it for witnessing her knocked off balance. He stood. “Excuse me,” he said.
She looked at him, suddenly ferocious. “With pleasure.”
Helen was moving with more speed than he’d thought her capable of. Calling her name, he caught up with her in the outer chamber, and when she didn’t slow he grabbed her bony elbow.
She turned on him. “This is not the time, Aaron Levy.”
“Stop,” he said. “Just stop a second. That’s a huge amount of money.”
“It’s a bargain, for those documents.”
“Why?”
She shook her head. “Stay with Bridgette. Don’t let her make any phone calls. Try not to let her look at the documents.”
“If they’re that valuable, don’t you think the university might buy them for us?”
She tried to shake her elbow free, but he gripped tighter, and wrapped her forearm under his. An unreasoning panic was rising in him—it was becoming a part of his life, this inability to control anything he cared about. “Where’s that money coming from?” he asked her.
She spoke as though addressing a half-wit. “My retirement savings.”
“I hardly think that’s a sound choice,” he said. “You’re going to need that money to live on.”
She seemed on the verge of laughter. “Don’t think I’m not touched by your protectiveness, Mr. Levy. But do you know whose signature was on that letter in the folio?”
He shook his head.
She let out a long breath before saying, weakly, “Spinoza.”
His grip softened. “Holy shit.”
“Spinoza might disagree with the holiness part.” An expression of barely contained incredulity had bloomed on her face. “But yes, Aaron. Ester Velasquez got him to answer.” She shook her arm free, and this time he let her. “Stay with Bridgette.”
He watched her disappear down the staircase.
Across the gallery, on the wall opposite him, hung a painting of a phallic tower thrusting out of what looked like a field of cotton-candy trees. A young couple stood before it, nodding approval—so eager, Aaron thought, to be shocked. Even as the house around them vibrated with a secret far more radical than any painting on its walls.
He’d once believed in a plain, patent world, in which whatever was noteworthy cried out proudly for attention. Now he saw how readily the most essential things went unseen.
He found Bridgette in the bedchamber, shuffling the pages. Seeing him, she snapped the folio shut. “I can’t make out this bloody writing,” she said.
“The style is called secretary hand,” he offered.
“I don’t give fuck-all what it’s called, what the hell is in here that’s so important to her?”
Her vulgarity told him that whatever veneer of polish she’d worn would now be dropped. He saw too that Bridgette was nearing the crest of some long-brewing storm that, he suddenly felt, had little to do with him . . . or with Helen, or even the documents, but rather with whatever private world Bridgette inhabited: a separate universe brushing his, but with the power to rip apart the culmination of all he’d labored for these past months.
And all that Helen had left.
He couldn’t have said who deserved those papers Bridgette was holding, except that he knew it wasn’t him. But he wanted them for Helen, because she wanted them.
“Who the fuck is Thomas Farrow?” Bridgette spat.
How much had she seen?
He spoke carefully: he’d tell the truth—just not all of it. “Farrow was an out-of-work actor. He wrote letters to philosophers. Mostly he ticked them off.”
“Letters worth twenty thousand quid?”
“I have no idea what they’re worth,” he said. “The only way to know is to have them evaluated. But that brings in outsiders. And”—he added honestly—“I don’t think Professor Watt’s offer will stick around if you do that.”
“Well,” said Bridgette, “as for that, isn’t there someone at the bank whose role is to prevent old bats from taking out all their savings at one grab, because some guru has offered them a séance with their dead Pekingese”—she chuckled—“or maybe because they’re bitter and want to get revenge on people they’ve worked with?”
He knew better than to respond to Bridgette’s jeering. Instead he formed a smile. “A banker might not dare stand in Helen’s way,” he said. “She can be a bit intimidating, if you hadn’t noticed. I suspect you’re in luck, if the twenty thousand appeals to you. I don’t think anything short of a patrimony law will stop her from buying those documents if you’re willing—and patrimony laws take years to enforce.”
“I don’t imagine she cares much what happens next year. Frankly, she doesn’t look as though she’s got too many more hours in her.”
He heard his voice rise. “That’s not true.”
“You ought to call your Jonathan Martin. He’ll love you forever for helping him snatch these papers from Helen. And so long as they pay me twenty-one thousand or so, I don’t mind waiting a few days. Keeping this just a bit longer isn’t going to cause me any trouble.”
She patted the folio, snugged now against her slender waist—and with a pang Aaron thought of Marisa. In his utter stupidity, he realized, he hadn’t yet changed the picture of her he held in his mind. It came to him now how Marisa must look: the curve of her belly like a taut half-moon, her keen gray-green eyes crinkled at the edges with laughter and strain, her strong back bowed against the weight. Her feet, shoeless, resting on a pillow at day’s end. He imagined her like a goddess of certainty, and his own unchanged body seemed pitiful in comparison. He was grateful she couldn’t see him here, obfuscating, in a building whose very walls were more soulful than he’d ever be.
Even as he thought this, Bridgette let out a soft laugh. Startled, he looked up to find her eyeing him with an unmistakably flirtatious expression. “Or maybe,” she said, “that’s going about it all wrong. Maybe we should evaluate the documents.”
The wind had shifted, and he had no idea why. She raised the folio, weighed it softly in the air, as though daring him.
He was at a loss as to what kind of game Bridgette was playing.
“You and I don’t have to be cowed by Helen’s type, do we?” she said.
His mouth was dry. But this was no time for him to forget how to play the game. “Careful, now,” he said lightly.