Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [49]
“Didier,” he had answered in the meanwhile. “Right, thanks. Uh-huh.” He made a scribbling motion at Wren, who got him a pencil and the back of a used envelope. “Right. Okay, thanks. No, that was what I was looking for, thanks. Right. No. Everything’s fine here. No, we don’t need your help. Uh-huh.”
Wren made a circling motion with her hand, and rolled her eyes. Lowell. It had to be Lowell. The dweeb. There was no love lost between her and Sergei’s gallery assistant. She thought he was a suck-up with a fetish for electronic toys, and he considered her a parasite without any redeeming social graces. Sergei did his best to keep them at opposite ends of the city. Dweeb, she thought again. If he only knew what his oh-so-artsy boss did in his spare time!
Sergei hung up the phone, and looked at her, a faraway look in his eyes, what Wren called his thousand-yard stare. When his gaze was cold, it made people tremble in their shoes and back away with minimal breathing so as not to catch his attention. It had taken her several years to get over the urge to run, when he got like that. And another year or so to realize it would never be turned on her. When it went hazy like it was now, though, it meant he was running through a hundred different possibilities, calculating the odds. The latter look was only marginally safer to be around than the former, and it did get used on her every now and again.
“What? Tell me it’s not the government again,” she pleaded. The first and only and hopefully last time they had trod on the toes of the FBI, even Sergei’s best contacts had been forced to do some very fast talking to smooth things over. The government’s top-secret official position was that there was no such thing as magic, no such thing as Talent, and absolutely no such thing as the Cosa Nostradamus. But they came down pretty hard on anyone using that nonexistent Talent anywhere near them.
“No, not this time. Our motive is greed, pure, and not-so-simple. Not financial—aesthetic. I was right, Prevost is a collector.”
“How do you know that? And how do you know it’s the right guy? We got a couple of Prevosts on this coast—he’s been to your gallery? We have an address? Wait a minute, collector of what? Fine art and chunks of concrete don’t exactly match, hanging on the wall. Even the weird-ass shi—stuff you sell.”
“A collector of things other people don’t have,” he clarified, ignoring her usual slur on his artists. “He came off the broom—” Sergei’s less-than-fond way of describing the Players, or magic wannabes, who came into the gallery “—a few years ago, trolling for items that might be one of a kind. Items of a magical provenance. Which means that he was plugged in enough to know I might be a source, which means he’d also know enough to keep asking in the right places. And he would keep at it—he had those vibes, which was why I remembered him. He’d keep digging until someone actually was stupid or hungry enough to give him what he wanted—or tell him where and how to get it. It seems a damned likely match, yes?”
Wren stared at him. “Yes. Damn, yes. Which means you were right, if this guy’s not a Talent himself—”
Sergei shook his head. “I’d lay money he’s not.”
“—then our thief was probably on retainer, maybe had been from when you first encountered this collector-guy, or soon after. A steady job, no need to advertise his or her abilities, which would explain the lack of flash.” She shook her head, considering all the ramifications. “A collector. Great. I hate this job. Have I told you how much I hate this job?”
“Not yet,” he sighed, sitting back down in the chair. “But I suspect I’ll be hearing it a great deal.”
A good retriever could get into any building ever built. And Wren was the best retriever working in the United States, maybe in all of North America today. Some locations might take less time,