penitent rebuked little boy.
All at once he heard himself saying, “Well, I’m not here to love art. I’m here working on a case.”
“You’re—did you say case?” Ghislaine didn’t know quite how to put it. “I mean, I thought you were…”
“You thought I’d been ‘relieved of duty’? Right? I’m still relieved of duty, but what I’m doing here is a private investigation. It’s about these paintings.” He swept his hand in an arc, as if to take in every painting in the place. He knew he shouldn’t say it, but this was a way to bury Ghislaine’s milestone loftiness and all the rest of it. He leaned next to her ear and said, “These are all fakes, everything in both rooms.”
“What?” said Ghislaine. “What do you mean, fakes?”
“I mean they’re forgeries. Pretty good ones, I hear, but forgeries, every last one of them.”
Nestor loved the startled look on her face. He had rocked her with that one. Whether or not he was a palurdo suddenly became irrelevant. He had hoisted the whole subject up to an infinitely more important plane… where art historians were little butterflies or insects.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m afraid that’s true. They’re forgeries, all right, and I know who Korolyov went to, to get them done, and I’ve been in the secret studio where he did them. What I’ve got to do is prove it. If they’re fakes—” He shrugged, as if to say, “Then we won’t have to waste time on that milestone stuff.”
There you had it! His work, his expertise as a private investigator, made her rebuke seem silly and girlish—and only then did he realize he shouldn’t have divulged anything about what he was doing. Now, on behalf of nothing but his wounded vanity, he had entrusted all this to a college girl he barely knew.
No! He did know her. She was transparent, and she was honest. He could trust her. He could tell that from the very start. Nevertheless… now that he had gone and done something foolish, it was time to get absolutely serious.
He gave her something just short of a Cop Look. “That’s just between us, you and me, okay? You understand?”
He Cop-Looked at her until he got that pledge out of her. “Yes,” she said in a tiny voice, almost a whimper, “I understand.”
Now he felt guilty. The quickest way to alienate her—and lose her trust—would be to continue in this tough-guy mode. So he broke into the softest and most loving smile he could come up with. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to sound so… so… serious and everything. If there’s anyone I can trust, it’s you. I absolutely—I just know that. I’ve known that from the start, and—”
He caught himself. From the start of what exactly? Now he was going overboard in the other direction.
“Anyway, you know what I mean… So that’s the main reason I’m here. I figured I should actually see all this—and I figured it was a chance to see you. I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to me that you’re here.”
Now the loving look he gave her was completely sincere. Having her by his side was a little bit of Heaven. For the first time, the words actually formed in his mind: “I’m in love with her.”
¡Mierda!—his iPhone! He had turned off the ring and put it on vibrate and now it was hopping around in his pocket. The caller ID told him it was John Smith. So he shot a quick Dios mío look at Ghislaine and bolted out of the gallery and into the lobby and put both hands around the offending instrument and answered in an exceedingly hushed voice:
“Camacho.”
“Nestor, where are you?” said the voice of John Smith. “You sound like you’re underneath a load of sand.”
“I’m in the museum. I thought I’d actually take a look at these—what we’re talking about. I’m—”
John Smith trampled right over Nestor’s voice: “Listen, Nestor, I just heard from Igor. He’s in a bad way. He just read the article—or somebody read it to him.”
“This late?”
“Somebody called him. I doubt Igor even reads English, and probably the same goes for his friends, whoever they might be. Anyway, he’s really agitated. I thought at first he was mad at me. He probably is, but that wasn’t what he was all worked up over. He’s terrified. He thinks Korolyov’s going to come get him. He really believes that. He’s afraid they’ll ambush him, ambush, as in kill, assassinate. He thinks they’ve