“I’m making you a sandwich,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Do you like chicken liver paté?”
“Are you—” Jane’s head is aching. “Are you using the Brancusi sculpture to pay someone to move the Panzavecchia children out of the house? Because of something to do with smallpox?”
“See now,” Mrs. Vanders says, pausing in her swift slicing of thick, dark bread to peer at Jane keenly. “This is what I mean. If you’ve managed to figure that out, it suggests to me that you have instincts for our kind of work.”
“But—it’s not your Brancusi,” says Jane. “You’re stealing the Brancusi?”
“We do not steal the family art,” says Mrs. Vanders. “We borrow it, to use as collateral while we act as go-betweens. I give a picture or sculpture to Person X. Person X releases an item to me—an agent I’m trying to save, information, goods—and I deliver that item to Person Y. Person Y pays me with the thing Person X needs—again, an agent, information, goods—and I deliver that thing to Person X. Person X gives me the picture or the sculpture back. A masterpiece is an excellent cash alternative. Recognizable, with undeniable value, and harder to trace than cash, which isn’t an option anyway, because we don’t have it.”
Jane feels herself stupidly nodding. She’s heard of this strategy. “But Ravi doesn’t know,” she says.
“No one in the Thrash family knows about ESF,” says Mrs. Vanders. “I’ll tell Ravi I’ve taken a picture away to clean it, or that I’m doing some sort of research on it.”
“You’ll lie,” says Jane.
Mrs. Vanders piles cheese and pickles and paté onto bread. “People want to hurt these children,” she says. “There’s a woman who’s offered to move Grace and Christopher Panzavecchia for us, in return for the brief loan of our Brancusi and also our Rembrandt. She’s a peculiar woman. It’s not about money or information for her; it’s about having various pieces of art in her collection, briefly, from time to time. And she never asks for anything easy. The Rembrandt picture is big and heavy, painted on wood, and the Brancusi sculpture so fragile, but those are the only two pieces that’ll do for her this time. We’ll have them back in the house within a week.”
“Why are the Panzavecchias so important?”
“I can’t answer that,” says Mrs. Vanders. “ESF provides protection, to political agents who are exploited, kidnapped, left to fend for themselves. If their loyalties come into question, we provide exit strategies, safe passage for them and their families. Often our services require the help of third parties. These third parties don’t help us out of the kindness of their hearts. They require payment. We’ve learned to use whatever’s available to us.”
“By lying to people in this house who trust you implicitly,” says Jane.
“What should I be doing instead?” she says, exasperated. “Should I never lie, which would endanger countless people? Should I not risk the house art, when it can ensure the safety of two children?”
“I need to go now,” says Jane.
“Don’t say anything to anyone,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Grace and Christopher Panzavecchia are only eight and two. You’ll endanger their lives if you speak of any of this to the wrong person. Would you like that on your conscience? A dead child?”
“Why should I believe you’re trying to help them?” says Jane. “If you’re being so helpful, why does Grace keep trying to sneak away? Why did she break the sculpture you need so badly to ‘rescue’ her?”
“Grace is a traumatized child who’s been torn from her family and desperately wants to go home,” says Mrs. Vanders. “She doesn’t understand that home no longer exists. She’s trying to create problems for us, draw attention. She’s acting out! But even she knows where the line is!”
“Why does home no longer exist? What happened?”
“That is far more information than you’re in need of at this juncture,” says Mrs. Vanders.
“Where’s Baby Leo?” Jane asks. “Why is no one talking about him?”
“The baby is safe,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Here’s your sandwich, some grapes, and a kumquat.” She shoves a plate at Jane so forcefully that grapes go diving off the edge, rolling into unknown and unreachable parts of the pantry.
“I can’t believe you lie to Ravi,” says Jane. “And Kiran too. Every single day. How can you do that?”
Mrs. Vanders’s face is made of granite. She shoves a doughnut onto Jane’s plate, causing more grapes to go flying. “We’ll be keeping an eye on you,” she says. “We’ll know if you start wandering the house. And we have ways of knowing if you’re engaging in mobile phone or Internet activity. If we decide that we can’t trust you to keep your mouth shut, you’ll find yourself deeply regretful.”
“Wow,” says Jane. “You really make me want to work for you. I want a job where I get to threaten innocent visitors and lie to all the people who trust me most.”
“On second thought,” says Mrs. Vanders, “you stay right here. I’m getting someone to walk you back to your rooms.”
“Kiss my ass,” Jane says, then turns and walks out.
*
As Jane is making her way up the back staircase with her plate, Patrick comes clattering down from the west attics, which doesn’t surprise her. He reaches her, then turns back around to accompany her. Jane doesn’t even look at him.
“What would you do if I started screaming something about your stupid organization?” she says. “Wrestle me down and gag me?”
“No,” says Patrick calmly. “But I would stop you.”
“I’m innocent, you know,” Jane says, “and I didn’t ask to be involved in all this crap.”
“Didn’t you?” says Patrick. “Weren’t you following Grace around this morning? And weren’t you asking everyone questions about your aunt Magnolia?”
“Not because I was hoping to find out she was a spy!”
“She had reasons.”
“Do me a favor,” says Jane, “and don’t flaunt the ways you knew my aunt better than I did.”
“Don’t be silly,” says Patrick. “She was your aunt. You’re the one who knew her.”
He sounds like he means it, but it’s too absurd to be answerable. They’re walking back the way Jane came before, through the second story’s west wing, past Aunt Magnolia’s photograph.
If it’s even hers.
“All these years,” she says to Patrick, “you’ve been lying to Kiran about who you really are.”
He doesn’t speak again for the rest of the walk.
*
Jane remembers the questions she’d had after Aunt Magnolia’s death. One of her aunt’s colleagues had called from the Antarctic Peninsula. “A storm came up,” he’d said, his voice cutting in and out; the connection on that phone call had been terrible. “She was too far from the base. She never made it back. I’m sorry,” he’d said, but Jane hadn’t understood what that meant.
So she’d dragged herself to her doctor, Doctor Gordon, and asked what it meant to die in a snowstorm in Antarctica.
Doctor Gordon had sat Jane down gently. “The first thing that happens is that your blood moves from your skin and extremities to your core,” she’d said. “This is called vasoconstriction. It helps you conserve what heat you have, rather than lose it to the environment.” She’d stopped, waited for Jane’s nod. “Then you start shivering,” she’d gone on, “all over your body. You become clumsy. It becomes difficult to use your hands or walk.” Another nod. “Your thoughts start to get dull, you have some amnesia. Apathy sets in, which is a blessing, really. You might burrow somewhere, like a hibernating bear,” she’d said, “before you lose consciousness. Once you do lose consciousness, you might wake now and then to hallucinations, but finally you fall asleep and don’t wake up again. Your body can take a long time to die, but during that time, you’re not suffering. Do you appreciate that, Janie? That at the end, she wasn’t suffering?”