The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,318

picture book where aproned tradespeople swept the floors and tabby cats napped in sunny windows.

But there was much too much to see, and I was overwhelmed and exhausted and cold. Finally, by accosting strangers for directions (rosy housewives with armloads of flowers, tobacco-stained hippies in wire-rimmed glasses), I retraced my path over canal bridges and back through narrow fairy-lit streets to my hotel, where I immediately changed some dollars at the front desk, went up for a shower in the bathroom which was all curved glass and voluptuous fixtures, hybrid of the Art Nouveau and some icy, pod-based, science fiction future, and fell asleep face down on the bed—where I was awakened, hours later, by my cell phone spinning on the bed table, the familiar chirrup making me think, for a moment, I was at home.

“Potter?”

I sat up and reached for my glasses. “Um—” I hadn’t drawn the curtains before I fell asleep and reflections of the canal wavered across the ceiling in the dark.

“What’s wrong? Are you high? Don’t tell me you went to a coffee shop.”

“No, I—” Dazedly I slid an eye around—dormers and beams, cupboards and slants and—out the window, when I stood, rubbing my head—canal bridges lighted in tracework, arched reflections on black water.

“Well I’m coming up. You don’t have a girl up there, do you?”

vi.

MY ROOM WAS TWO different elevators and a walk from the front desk, so I was surprised how quickly the knock came. Gyuri, discreetly, went to the window and stood with his back to us while Boris looked me over. “Get dressed,” he said. I was barefoot, in the hotel robe and my hair standing on end from falling asleep straight out of the shower. “You need to clean up. Go—comb your hair and shave.”

When I emerged from the bathroom (where I’d left my suit hanging to let the wrinkles fall out) he pursed his lips critically and said: “Don’t you have anything better than that?”

“This is a Turnbull and Asser suit.”

“Yes but it looks like you slept in it.”

“I’ve been wearing it a while. I have a better shirt.”

“Well put it on.” He was opening a briefcase on the foot of the bed. “And get your money and bring it here.”

When I came back in, doing up my cufflinks, I stopped dead in the middle of the room to see him standing head bent at the bedside, intent upon assembling a pistol: snapping a pin with a clear-eyed competence like Hobie at work in the shop, pulling back the slide with a forceful true-to-life quality, click.

“Boris,” I said, “what the mother fuck.”

“Calm down,” he said to me, with a sideways glance. Patting his pockets, taking out a magazine and popping it in: snick. “Is not what you think. Not at all. Is just for show!”

I looked at Gyuri’s broad back, perfectly impassive, the same professional deafness I sometimes turned away to assume, in the shop, when couples were bickering over whether to buy a piece of furniture or not.

“It is just—” He was snapping something back and forth on the gun, expertly, testing it, then bringing it up to his eye and sighting it, surreal gestures from some deep underlayer of the brain where the black and white movies flickered twenty-four hours a day. “We are meeting them on their own ground, and they will be three. Well, really only two. Two that count. And I can tell you now—I was a little worried Sascha might be here. Because then I couldn’t go with you. But everything has worked out perfectly, and here I am!”

“Boris—” standing there, it had crashed in on me all at once, in a sick rush, what a dumb fucking thing I’d stepped into—

“No worries! I have done the worrying for you. Because—” patting me on the shoulder—“Sascha is too nervous. He is afraid to show his face in Amsterdam—afraid it will get back to Horst. For good reason. And this is very very good news for us.

“So.” He snapped the gun shut: chrome silver, mercury black, with a smooth density that blackly distorted the space around it like a drop of motor oil in a glass of water.

“Don’t tell me you’re taking that,” I said, in the incredulous silence that followed.

“Well, yes. For holster—to keep in holster only. But wait, wait,” he said, lifting a palm, “before you start—” although I wasn’t talking, I was only standing there blank with horror—“how many times do I have to say it? Is only for looks.”

“You’ve got to