“But that makes no sense! Don’t you think it will look more suspicious if we suddenly left without saying goodbye? No one but the three of us knows what happened and …”
Just then, Charlotte heard the elevator doors opening. She ran to the door and saw George coming down the hallway, looking a bit out of breath.
“What happened?” Charlotte asked anxiously.
“I caught up with them. I had to chase them all the way down to Via le Botteghe, but I got to them.”
“Oh dear, did you get into a fight?”
“We managed to negotiate. It was all very civilized. We went to the nearest ATM, I got them some cash, and they gave me the drone.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s all destroyed, the hard drive, everything. I crushed it with a rock and threw it off a cliff. That’s why it took me so long.”
“Oh, thank God. Thank God, thank God, thank God.” Charlotte sighed in relief. “How much did you have to pay them?”
“Don’t worry about it.” George peeked in at Lucie leaning by the archway to her bedroom. He was about to say something to her when Charlotte cut him off.
“George, will you please come with me for a moment to my room? There are a few things we need to discuss,” Charlotte said, suddenly taking on a no-nonsense tone.
George nodded wearily.
“Charlotte! What are you doing?” Lucie asked suspiciously.
“Pack your bags, Lucie.”
“Charlotte, no!” Lucie cried out in alarm.
Charlotte ignored Lucie, closing the door firmly behind her as she marched George Zao down the hallway toward her room.
II
* * *
NEW YORK
2018
CHAPTER ONE
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Upper East Side
“Tell me what you see. Tell me why you like it,” Marian Churchill (Seattle Country Day / Lakeside / Harvard / Columbia PhD) said to her son, Freddie, as they stood in front of Balthus’s immense painting Summertime in the contemporary wing of the Met.
“I see innocence, I see subversion, I see a horny couple,” Freddie (All Souls / Saint David’s / Saint Paul’s / Princeton, Class of ’20) said.
Marian smacked her son on the arm with her rolled-up museum guide. “Be serious! You were the one who dragged me all the way here from my favorite Vermeers to see this painting.”
“The girl in the middle of the painting is actually Balthus’s reimagining of Narcissus. Just look at all the different perspectives, the hidden figures and all their various agendas. The creepy guy smoking the pipe, the sleeping girl, that mysterious couple wandering in the distance. There’s so much intrigue in the picture, you could write a whole novel about it!”
“Then you should write it! And you know what? You’re right … I think that couple is looking for someplace private to get it on,” Marian said, squinting at the figures huddled in the background. The two of them began giggling, which soon exploded into fits of uncontrollable laughter as several museum patrons cast dirty looks in their direction.
Marian, still heaving from laughter, turned away from the painting in an effort to collect herself. “Oh, look, Grant Wood! The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. I love Grant Wood.”
“I’m getting a grant wood just looking at it!” Freddie said, as the two of them burst into laughter again.
Freddie glanced at his watch and gasped. “Oh, shit, three twenty-two p.m., we’re going to be late!”
Grabbing his mother’s hand, the two of them began racing through the galleries, past the Rockefeller wing, down a flight of stairs, and out the little-used exit that opened onto the street level of the museum, facing Fifth Avenue.
“Cecil said to cross Fifth and stand on the steps outside Adolfo’s old building to get the best view. And try to look inconspicuous,” Freddie said.
“I blend in everywhere, dear. I just look like another Asian tourist. But you shouldn’t have worn that coat,” Marian said, scrutinizing his dapper navy-and-green-striped rowing blazer.
The two of them stood under the awning of the red-and-white stone Beaux-Arts mansion, staring in anticipation at the iconic steps of the museum, crowded like any other Saturday with visitors meeting friends, lounging in the sun, having snacks, and posing for selfies. To the casual observer, Marian and Freddie could have fit in perfectly with the rest of the crowd—they looked like two college-aged friends hanging out.
Marian’s skin was preternaturally unlined, and between her petite frame and gamine pixie-cut hair, she retained such a youthful look and demeanor that people often assumed she was in her mid-twenties and not twice that age. When Freddie was a child, she was always mistaken for his au pair, since his more Caucasian-dominant features and dark blond curls bore little resemblance to her classically Chinese face. These days, one could see more of a resemblance to his mother in his perfect Cupid’s bow and his refined, high cheekbones, though his hair had evolved into a floppy rich chestnut mop that every girl in the 10021 zip code (and many in the 10010) found irresistible.
“Didn’t Cecil say it would start at three thirty p.m.? It’s already three forty and nothing’s happening,” Marian observed.
“Blair Waldorf better appear and start doing parkour on those steps or I want my money back,” Freddie quipped. “This is typical Cecil, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s the master of hyperbole. Everything’s always the ‘best in the world,’ the ‘most exclusive’ or ‘one of a kind’ with him. Today he said, ‘Freddie, don’t you think you’ll be the luckiest guy in the world to have me as a brother-in-law?’”
“Oh, jeez, he actually said that?” Marian cackled. “What did you say back?”
“I said, ‘Not really.’”
“You did not!”
“I sure did. I asked, ‘How exactly does that make me the luckiest guy in the world?’ And he said, ‘You’ll have access to my houses, the yacht, the plane, all my clubs, and now that we’re related, Town & Country has no choice but to put you on its ‘Most Eligible Bachelors’ list next year. You stand to benefit the most from the Cecil Pike halo effect.’”
“Ha! That’s priceless. As if you’ll ever need his help. The girls have been banging down our door since you were five!”
“I hate to break it to you, but Cecil already wants us all to spend New Year’s Eve in Saint Barth’s.”
“Yuck, no thank you! What are we going to do? Hang out on that obscenely large boat of his with Russian oligarchs and Beyoncé? We always spend New Year’s in East Hampton.”
“I warned him you wouldn’t be happy. He said you would change your mind the moment you see the new villa.”
Marian rolled her eyes.
“Peter … Peter Submarina or something like that designed it. The guy who only designs houses for billionaires and kings, or so Cecil claims.”
“Peter Marino, you mean. Oh, look, there’s Cecil!” Marian said excitedly.