started, and I cut him off.
“No, I’m fine,” I lied. “I’m not going to throw up,” I added, though I felt like that was a distinct possibility.
“So you see,” said B, speaking so softly that his voice was almost drowned out by the buses and taxis on Central Park West.
“Yeah, asshole. I see.”
He was sipping a bottle of peach Snapple through a pink bendy straw, and he glanced at me. Out in the light of day, Jesus, he looked even worse than he had in the museum. Haggard. Broken. Empty. The swaggering pansy thug who’d bullied and haunted me so long reduced now to a dry shell and not much fucking else. Just a few hours before, nothing would have pleased me more than seeing this man so completely undone. But a lot can happen to a dead girl in a few hours, and all I felt, looking at him, all I felt was revulsion and pity. And that made me angry. It made me very angry, feeling sorry for B after all the shit he’d visited upon my person. But there you go. Sympathy for goddamn devils, indeed.
“You’re going to Boston?” he asked, then took another swallow of Snapple.
“What the fuck for?” I asked him right back.
B cleared his throat and set the Snapple bottle on the ground at his feet.
“She wasn’t there, B. Yeah, I saw a lot of shit, but I didn’t see Selwyn. I need a cigarette.”
Charlee took a yellow pack of American Spirits from an inside pocket of his faux fur, shook one out, lit it, and passed it to me; he left lipstick stains on the filter. The smoke tasted even better than the crisp fall air.
“Doesn’t mean a thing,” said B. “In your heart of hearts, whatever’s left of it, you know she’s with them.”
The fucker had a point.
In the tunnel, I’d put the question to Isobel.
“She believes we have the traitor,” she’d said. And Isaac, he’d chimed in, “So, that’s how we’ll get your attention, Twice-Damned.”
I took another drag on the cigarette and held the smoke for a couple of minutes before I exhaled. Such are the questionable benefits of not needing oxygen.
“Charlee, what you showed me, it was past, future, everything all scrambled up together. I get that part, but the way it turned out, that last bit in . . .”
“Nothing’s set in stone,” he said. “What you saw, think of it like you would a weather forecast.”
I managed a coarse laugh.
“Wow. As accurate as all that?”
“As mutable as all that,” he replied.
“Yeah, well . . . I didn’t see anything that convinced me going to Boston was any sort of good idea.” Then I turned to B. “I do understand,” I told him. “The whole vendetta thing you’ve got going with the Snows. They fucked you up hard, and you want them dead, and they have it coming a hundred times over. But that’s your fight, old man, not mine. When Pickman contacts me, then I’ll—”
“You’ll what, precisely?” asked B.
He fixed me with his bleary gray eyes, then asked Charlee to light a cigarette for him, too. The boy took out a silver case filled with rainbow-colored Nat Shermans.
“All they want is the Madonna,” I said. “All I want is Selwyn back. Pickman said—”
“Oh, kitten.” He sighed and shook his head. “You disappoint me.” He accepted a baby-blue Nat Sherman from Charlee. He took a puff and shut his eyes.
“And how the hell’s that, exactly?”
He exhaled and scratched his whiskered chin.
He sighed again. “You’ve never missed a chance to remind me I’m a liar, have you? And it’s true; a liar is what I am.”
“Among other things,” I muttered.
“Exactly,” he said and nodded his head, smoke leaking from his nostrils. “I’m a liar, a killer, a cheat, a bugger of anything what stands still long enough. I’m a goddamn heel and a miscreant; that’s me. A right and proper arse. A villain. So, when I tell you how I stand in awe of Pickman’s perfidious ways, you ought to know I’m telling you the truth.”
Ever heard of the liar’s paradox? No? Well, it goes something like that.
“Every single word I utter is a lie,” I said, “but right now? Right now, I’m telling you the truth. Is that the gist of it, Mr. Barrett?” I glanced at Charlee. He was watching a squirrel perched on the lowest branch of a sugar maple. The squirrel twitched its tail—once, twice, three times. Its black eyes stared warily back at Charlee, like