Page 164 of Portrait of an Unknown Woman

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Pierre Hotel

When Magdalena left her suite on the twentieth floor of the Pierre Hotel for the last time, she was clad in the same dark pantsuit she had been wearing the night she plucked Oliver Dimbleby from the pavements of Bury Street in London. She had her Spanish driver’s permit and a single twenty-dollar bill, but no phone or passport. And no handbag, either. It was lying at the foot of her unmade bed, next to a Spanish-language copy ofLove in the Time of Cholera. It was, in Gabriel’s opinion, the clearest evidence of her intent. Of his many female friends and acquaintances, not one would take flight without a purse. Therefore, he was confident that there was some other explanation for Magdalena’s sudden disappearance. An explanation that in all likelihood involved Phillip Somerset and Leonard Silk.

Whatever had happened, the hotel’s surveillance cameras had been watching. Gabriel rang Yuval Gershon, explained the situation, and asked him to have a look at the recordings. Yuval suggested that Gabriel have a word with hotel security instead.

“I have a terrible feeling hotel security was involved.”

“What makes you think that?”

“The elevators mysteriously froze around the time she went missing.”

“Describe her.”

“Tall, long dark hair, dark pantsuit, no handbag.”

“It looks to me as though you’re on the nineteenth floor.”

“Twentieth, Yuval.”

“I’ll get back to you when I have something.”

Gabriel rang off. Sarah was anxiously pacing the room. Evelyn Buchanan was staring at her laptop with the shocked expression of someone who had just witnessed a murder.

“Is something wrong?” asked Gabriel.

“My article just disappeared from my screen.” Evelyn dragged a forefinger across her trackpad. “And my documents folder is empty. All of my work, including my notes and the transcript of my interview with Magdalena, is gone.”

Gabriel quickly disconnected his computer from the hotel’s Wi-Fi network and instructed Evelyn to do the same. “How long will it take you to retype the piece?”

“It’s not a matter of simply retyping it. I have to rewrite it from beginning to end. Five thousand words. Entirely from memory.”

“Then I suggest you get started.” Gabriel snatched up his phone and looked at Sarah. “Double-lock the door, and don’t open it for anyone but me.”

He went into the corridor without another word and headed for the elevators. An empty carriage appeared at once. He rode it down to the lobby and left the hotel via the Fifth Avenue entrance.

Outside, the sun had dropped below the trees of Central Park, but the twilight was abundant. Gabriel turned to the left and then made another left onto East Sixtieth Street. As he passed the entrance of the fabled Metropolitan Club, the private playground of New York’s financial elite, he spotted two men sitting in a parked Suburban. Bothwere wearing earpieces. The one behind the wheel noticed Gabriel first. He said something to his partner, who turned his head to have a look at the legend as well.

The legend rounded the corner onto Madison Avenue and walked to East Sixty-First Street. The second team was parked directly opposite the Pierre’s delivery entrance. They were three in number—the third member being the hacker who had penetrated the Pierre’s Wi-Fi network and sucked the documents off Evelyn’s laptop.

Gabriel was tempted to ask the hacker to return the purloined material. Instead, he crossed Fifth Avenue and entered Central Park. There he sat down on a bench and waited for his phone to ring, wondering, not for the first time, how his life had come to this.

Though Gabriel did not know it, Magdalena was at that moment pondering the same question. She was seated not on a park bench but in the back of a luxury SUV, next to a man who a few minutes earlier had threatened to kill her if she did not agree to flee the country with the financier whose art-based hedge fund she had exposed as a fraud. She had been given no information regarding their destination, though her lack of a passport suggested that their journey would be unconventional. It would begin, apparently, with a helicopter flight, as they were parked beneath the FDR Drive, near the pale-gray, boxlike terminal of the East Thirty-Fourth Street Heliport.

Magdalena glanced at her wristwatch, the Cartier tank that Clarissa the personal shopper had chosen for her at Bergdorf Goodman that frigid December afternoon in 2008. What a waste, she thought suddenly, these costly trinkets. Art was all that mattered—art and books and music. And family, of course. It had been a mistake to involve her father in Phillip’s fraud. Still, she was confidenthe would not be prosecuted. Art criminals never received the punishment they deserved. It was one of the reasons there was so much art crime.

A second SUV drew up beside them, and Tyler Briggs emerged from the passenger seat. Evidently, Magdalena would have a chaperone on the first leg of her journey into exile, lest she misbehave on board the aircraft and endanger the crew. She was considering one final act of insurrection before leaving Manhattan, a parting gesture to avenge her split and swollen lip.

Her seatmate was looking down at his phone. “Your ride is about to land,” he informed her.

“Where am I going?”

“East Hampton.”

“In time for dinner, I hope.”

“It’s only the first stop.”