Alafair Burke: Long Gone

She took a second look at the images. Alice had been raised in a wholly secular existence. She could count the number of times she’d been to church on two hands, and then only on holidays and for weddings. And yet even Alice had a visceral reaction to these images. They had no beauty. They were interesting only because they provoked. They were wrong.

“And what exactly is the Highline Gallery’s loyalty to this artist?”

Drew used his index finger on the mouse to close the image files and open a Web site called www.hansschuler.com. A photograph of an attractive, early-thirtyish man with light brown curls occupied the screen. “Your first showing has to feature this idiot. Then two or three exclusive shows per year-maybe three or four weeks each-after that. In the interim, you can do whatever you want, but you’ll still have to sell the guy. He’s the weak link. All I ask is that you look before you leap. It’s one thing to tell my client now that this might not happen. Quite another to search for someone else two months from now because you bailed.”

Alice had known in her gut that something about this whole thing was too good to be true, but now she at least knew her enemy. If she took this job, Hans Schuler-artist-slash-paramour-was likely to be the constant pain in her ass for as long as she enjoyed her employment. She reminded herself that the best things in her life had come to her organically.

“Okay, I’m in.”

“Really? All right, then. I can let the leasing company know I’m ready to sign the paperwork now. You want to come with? They’re out in Hoboken, but it’s a nice day for a drive.”

Given the gallery owner’s desire to remain anonymous, Alice supposed that Drew was going to be the closest thing she had to a functional boss. After she’d been laid off from the museum, one of her former coworkers let slip that Alice, unlike her colleagues, hadn’t gone the “extra mile” by participating in activities outside the formal job. It couldn’t hurt to start putting her best foot forward at the start.

“A drive sounds good.”

D rew accelerated through the loop into the Holland Tunnel. She could tell he enjoyed the way the BMW handled the curves, low and tight. She felt like she should say something impressive. Something about torque or suspension or German engineering. All she came up with was, “I can’t even remember the last time I drove a car.”

Growing up, her parents had a chauffeur for the family in the city, so her only opportunities to drive had been at their house in Bedford or on an infrequent visit to her father’s place in Los Angeles. She went through the teenage ritual of obtaining a license but had never been particularly comfortable behind the wheel. Now she preferred her nondriving existence, tooling around Manhattan by foot, subway, and the occasional taxi in bad weather.

“That’s what happens when you grow up in the city.” Drew hit his fog lights as the sedan hit the tunnel. “You grow up in Tampa, Florida, and you drive. My friends say I’m crazy for keeping a car in the city, but I like the freedom to hop behind the wheel and go whenever and wherever I want.”

She didn’t recall telling Drew she’d been raised in Manhattan. He must have Googled her before offering her the job. Lord knew she’d entered her own name in search engines before, simply out of boredom-induced curiosity.

On the spectrum of Google-able names, Alice Humphrey fell somewhere between Jennifer Smith and Engelbert Humperdink. Most of the hits belonged to a scientist who had written what was apparently a politically divisive book about global warming. More recently, sixteen-year-old Alice Humphrey of Salt Lake City had been kicking butt and taking names on her high school soccer team. But this particular Alice Humphrey had her own online existence. Unfortunately, most of it was not of her own making. Sure, there was her Facebook page, as well as a couple of mentions for her work on museum events. But any marks she had made out there in the virtual world as Alice Humphrey the woman were far outweighed by mentions of Alice Humphrey, former child actress and daughter to Oscar-winning director Frank Humphrey.

She was tempted to ask Drew whether it made a difference. To ask whether she would have gotten the job if she had been just plain old boring Alice Humphrey, with, say, a schoolteacher mother and an accountant father. But to ask that would be unfair, both to Drew and to her. There was no correct answer, and no appropriate response for her to then offer in kind. She no longer wanted to take anything from her father, but she was in fact his daughter. That was never going to change. And so far, Drew hadn’t uttered one word about her family. For her to raise the issue, just because of an innocuous comment about driving, would officially make her the freaky thin-skinned girl.

“So what exactly do you do, Drew?”

“Well, I’ve got two possible responses to that question. One-the answer I might give to a woman on a first date-is that I’m an entrepreneur. Are you suitably impressed?”

“Honestly? I’m not sure I’ve ever understood entrepreneurship as a job description.”

“Which is why there’s a second option-the one my mother might give you. If my mother were here-and not mixing up her it’s-finally-noontime martini down in Tampa-she’d probably tell you I’m a spoiled kid living off his family’s money.”

Apparently she wasn’t the only person in the car with delayed-cord-cutting issues. “Well, if those two versions are your only choices, I’d stick with the first.”

“Somewhere between asshole and pathetic daddy’s boy lies the truth, which is that I live a really great life and figure out ways to make people money in the process. Like, say I go to a tiny little restaurant with a young chef who’s doing everything right; I’ll see if he’s the kind of guy with bigger dreams that might require investors. Then I try to get a deal done and take a little commission for myself in the process.”

“Why does your mom give you a hard time?”

“Because usually the people I turn to for the seed money are the same two guys I’ve been working for since I was mowing lawns for the snowbirds as a kid. And they happen to be my dad’s friends, which makes them only slightly less despicable than the AntiChrist.”

“And one of these men is my new boss?”

“To the extent you have a boss.”

Drew pulled next to a parking hydrant in front of a rehabbed town house and hit the emergency blinkers. The ground floor’s front window was lined with commercial real estate listings. He was out of the car before she’d even unbuckled her seat belt. He tossed the keys on the driver’s seat before shutting his door. “You can drive, right?” he hollered from the curb. “Just in case?”

“Yeah, sure.”

She watched through the glass as he spoke first to the receptionist, then shook hands with a leggy woman with spiky black hair. She walked to a file cabinet and returned with some paperwork. He removed a pen from his sports coat pocket and gestured toward the car. Spiky woman was looking at her now. Was Alice supposed to wave or something? She pretended to fiddle with the car stereo, then saw Drew leaving the building in her periphery with the paperwork.

He hopped back into the driver’s seat, placed the documents on the center console, and began a rapid-fire signing of pages that had been pretabbed with hot pink tape.

“Creepy in there,” he said as he scrawled. “Those girls are all way too pale and tall. I felt like a field mouse dropped into the middle of an anaconda tank.”

“So you said you find ways to make other people money. Does my new boss see the Highline Gallery as a hobby, or is it actually supposed to turn a profit?”