Jane can imagine this too, though the three-year-old she’s picturing has a big camera around her neck and smells like jasmine and chlorine, which is surely ridiculous. Jane can’t really picture the fish. “The way Colin described it to me,” she says, “it’s pretty abstract, for a fish.”
“Right, but that’s the beauty of it,” Ravi says. “It’s the human experience of a fish. There isn’t a single scale or fin. It’s just an oblong sliver of marble. But it has such a sense of movement.” He waves a hand, beginning to move around the room in his enthusiasm, finding the spaces that are clear of umbrellas. “It practically disappears from a certain angle, like a fish flashing through water. It’s a perfect representation of what you really see when you see a fish in water, before your brain tries to fill in all the things you know about what makes a fish a fish. And no one but Brancusi could capture it that way. I expect it’s the reason he mounted it on a mirrored base, for the movement and the flashing.”
“I’m sorry it’s missing,” Jane says, partly because at this point, she wants to see it for herself. “How much is it worth?”
“I don’t care,” Ravi says. “That’s not what this is about.”
Jane suspects he isn’t trying to be endearing; he’s just being honest. And of course he can afford not to care about the money.
It’s endearing anyway. “I get that,” Jane says. “But it’ll matter to the investigation. I’m sure it matters to the thief.”
“Yes,” Ravi says, wiping his eyes tiredly with a hand. “Lucy will need to know. Lucy is going to find our fish and our Vermeer, and when she does, I’m going to tell the whole world. This is going to redeem her from the Rubens she lost.”
“It’s nice of you to think of your loss that way,” says Jane. “As Lucy’s redemption.”
“I’m a nice person,” Ravi says miserably. Then he picks up an umbrella, a closed one that’s propped in a corner. It’s not one Jane has given much thought to recently, one of her simpler, smaller affairs, with pale gores of various complementary yellows and a varnished mahogany rod and handle. With careful fingers, Ravi caresses the umbrella’s ferrule and its notch, its hand spring, for all the world looking as if he appreciates the care with which Jane created it.
“May I open it?” he asks her.
The only person who’s ever asked Jane’s permission before opening an umbrella is Aunt Magnolia. “Yes,” she says breathlessly. It really is one of her more decent umbrellas; as Ravi slides it open, she warms with sudden, unexpected pride.
“It’s elegant,” Ravi says. “You’re talented.”
“Thank you,” Jane manages to say.
“For a teenager,” he says with a cheeky grin.
“You were a teenager not that long ago.”
“True. It makes me think of Kiran,” Ravi says. “The soft colors. She should have it. Can I buy it from you?”
“Seriously?”
“Of course.”
Jane almost tells him he can have it, as a gift. But, rich people love to spend money, says Colin. “It’s a thousand dollars,” she says, obeying a slightly hysterical whim.
“Done,” Ravi says. “Can I give you a check later?”
“Ravi,” Jane says, stunned. “I was kidding.”
“Well, I’m not. I’ll leave it here until I’ve paid you.”
“You can take it with you! I trust you not to steal!”
Ravi’s grin flashes bright. “That’s something, I guess.”
“Not to steal the umbrella,” Jane amends.
“Good to know I’m on your list of suspects,” he says. “You may as well know you’re not on mine. I wouldn’t even know about the forgery if you hadn’t blurted it out about Mrs. Vanders’s suspicions.”
“I guess that’s true,” says Jane, alarmed to realize her role.
“I could see people paying thousands for some of these umbrellas, you know,” he says. “Have you thought of working with a dealer? I could show a few to Buckley.”
“Colin has already offered,” Jane says, “and I think you’re both delusional.”
“Damn Colin,” Ravi says cheerfully. “He’ll get the credit, and the commission.”
“I’m sure you’ll miss that ten dollars. You say thousands, but Colin says hundreds.”
Ravi shakes his head. “Buckley will value them higher. Not all of them, but a few of them. And he’ll want to see what you do in the future.”
He leaves with the yellow umbrella under his arm.
*
At dinner, Colin is the only person who seems to want to talk. Ravi isn’t even there. Phoebe frowns at her plate and Lucy glances up from her phone now and then to pretend she’s paying attention. Kiran looks tired, flinching every time Colin begins to speak, as if listening is an unbearable strain.
It’s hard to watch, but Jane hopes Colin will keep talking nonetheless, because he’s asking some of the very questions she wants to know the answers to.
“Is either piece insured?” he asks the table.
When no one else responds, Kiran finally stirs herself and says, “No.”
“Why not?” asks Jane, who can’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t insure art that’s so valuable.
Lucy speaks absently, as if bored, not raising her eyes from her phone. “Insurance on pieces like that, especially a Vermeer, is prohibitively expensive.”
“None of the art is alarmed, either,” says Kiran. “Octavian trusts people. I’ve never understood it,” she adds sadly.
“Well, at least that rules Octavian out as a suspect,” says Colin. “He’d gain much more by selling them than by stealing them.”
Kiran’s face hardens. “No one in my family stole the fucking art,” she says in a low voice.
“Sweetheart,” says Colin in amusement. “I just said he didn’t.”
“Maybe you think I took it?” says Kiran. “Or my brother, or my mother, or my stepmother?”
“Darling,” Colin says, in a deliberately soothing voice that makes Kiran’s shoulders stiffen more. “Of course I don’t, but you know it had to be someone. We figure it out by eliminating people.”
“Yes,” Kiran says, “I’m not twelve years old, I understand how it works. But since it has to be someone, let’s not talk about it at dinner. There’s no way to consider any of the suspects without getting someone’s back up at this table.”
Phoebe frowns extra hard at this. Jane wonders then if Kiran might suspect anything about Patrick. Could that be why she seems so miserable?
“Would you feel better if I spoke more generally?” asks Colin, in an avuncular tone that’s starting to grate on Jane’s nerves. “Do you know much about Vermeer?” he asks, startling Jane by addressing the question to her. “Did you know there are few Vermeers in existence? Another of them is missing too, stolen from a Boston museum in 1990. It’s probably being passed around as collateral in the drug world, maybe at seven or eight percent of its market value. That’s the going rate at the moment for a stolen picture.”
“Colin,” says Lucy, emerging from her phone and speaking sharply. “We don’t want to talk about it. Just shut up.”
At that moment, Ravi comes exploding into the banquet hall. “Lucy,” he says, swooping down on her. “Colin. I’m taking another look at the fake. I want you both to look at it too and give me your thoughts on the forger.”
“Right now?” Lucy says, not even glancing up, her fingers moving furiously across her phone keyboard. “I’m eating.”
“Right now,” Ravi says.
“I’ll come later.”
“You’re not actually eating, Lucy,” Ravi says. “Anyone can see that.”
“Ravi—”
His voice changes, to something quiet, and forlorn. “Luce. Please?”
Lucy looks up, into Ravi’s face. Then, sighing sharply, she pushes herself back from the table.
Colin, watching these proceedings, speaks in his careful, singsong voice. “Kiran,” he says, “do you mind if I go with Ravi?”
“No, it’s fine,” she says. “You should help.”
It’s a relief to watch him go. A minute later, Phoebe finishes her food and also excuses herself. Jane is alone with Kiran, who picks up her fork and stabs a green bean, then stabs it again.