Харлан Кобен - Win

What’s my type?

I wrote one word: Hot.

That’s my type. I don’t care whether she’s blonde, brunette, redhead, or bald. I don’t care whether she’s short or tall, heavyset or emaciated, white, Black, Asian, young, old, whatever.

My type?

I use one type of criteria and rank them thusly:

Super Super Hot.

Super Hot.

Hot.

More Hot Than Not.

That’s it. The rest, as I say, does not matter. I hold no prejudices or biases when it comes to hotness, and yet I ask you: Where are my laurels for being so open-minded?

I am first to arrive in the suite. The app tells me that my rendezvous partner is still fifteen minutes away. The shower is supplied with Kevis 8 shampoo and Maison Francis Kurkdjian Aqua Vitae scented shower cream. I take advantage of that. I strip down and close my eyes under the heavy stream of the propulsive-power-jet Speakman shower head.

I think chronologically for a moment. We have the Jane Street Six attack. We have the art heist at Haverford College. We have my uncle’s murder and my cousin’s abduction. Three different nights. The first two are connected by the Vermeer found in the possession of the most famous of the Jane Street Six. Then we add in the suitcase, and it becomes apparent that all three are somehow linked.

How?

Most obvious answer: By Ry Strauss.

We know Strauss was leader of the Jane Street Six. We know he was in possession of the stolen Vermeer (where is the Picasso, by the way?). We know that the suitcase, last seen when Patricia was abducted, was in his tower apartment.

Was he the mastermind behind all three?

I get out of the shower. Ms. 9.85 Rating should be here within minutes. I am about to silence my phone when Kabir calls.

“I found the security guard from the art heist.”

“Go on.”

“At the time of the robbery, he was an intern paying off student debts by working security at night.”

I remember this. One of the criticisms leveled at both the college and our family was that we had trusted two priceless masterpieces to shoddy security. It was a criticism, of course, that proved spot-on.

“His name is Ian Cornwell. He’d only graduated from Haverford the year before.”

“Where is he now?”

“Still at Haverford. In fact, he’s never left. Ian Cornwell is a professor in the political science department.”

“Find out if he’s on campus tomorrow. Also get a copter ready. I’m flying to Lockwood first thing in the morning.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“I need some information about Malachy’s.”

I start telling him what I need when I hear the elevator ping.

The 9.85 rating has arrived.

I finish up quickly and say, “No calls for the next hour.” Then, thinking about that rating, I add, “Perhaps the next two or three.”

I disconnect the phone as she steps out of the elevator.

I had assumed the rating would be an exaggeration. It isn’t.

She has always been — and remains now — at least a 9.85. For a moment, we just stare at one another. I am in my robe. She is in a crisply tailored business suit, but everything she wears always looks crisply tailored. I try to remember the last time I saw her in the flesh. When she and Myron ended their engagement, I gather, but I can’t recall the specifics. Myron had loved her with all his heart. She had shattered that heart into a million pieces. Part of me found the whole thing incomprehensible and tedious, this brokenhearted thing; part of me understood with absolute clarity why I would never let any woman leave me that way.

“Hello, Win.”

“Hello, Jessica.”

Jessica Culver is a fairly well-known novelist. After a decade together, she and Myron broke up because in the end, Myron wanted to settle down, marry, have children and Jessica sneered at that sort of idyllic conformity. At least, that was what she’d told Myron.

Not long after the breakup, Myron and I saw a wedding announcement in the New York Times . Jessica Culver had married a Wall Street tycoon named Stone Norman. I hadn’t seen, heard, or thought about her since.

“This is a surprise,” I say.

“Yep.”

“Guess it isn’t going so great with you and Rock.”

Immature of me to intentionally get the name wrong, but there you go.

Jessica smiles. The smile is dazzling and beautiful, but it doesn’t reach more than my eyes. I remember when that same smile used to knock poor Myron to his knees.

“It’s good to see you, Win.”

I tilt my head. “Is it?”

“Sure.”

We stand there a few more moments.

“So are we going to do this or what?”

The answer ends up being “what.”

Jessica and I spend the next hour lying on the bed and talking. Don’t ask me why, but I end up telling her about Ry Strauss and the Vermeer and the rest. She watches me closely as I speak, completely rapt. As I said, I don’t get romantic relationships. During the years that Jessica and Myron were a couple, I understood that she was very attractive and immensely doable, but so are a lot of women. I never got why Myron would want only one woman or put up with her mood swings and drama. Now, as she lies alongside me and gives me that laser focus, I perhaps get a tiny sliver of the appeal.

I stop and tell her this.

“You hated me,” Jessica says.

“No.”

“You viewed us as rivals.”

“You and I?”

“Yes.”

“For?”

“For Myron, of course.”

Jessica shifts on the bed. She is still clothed. I remain in my bathrobe. “You know I wrote a piece on the Jane Street Six for the New Yorker .”

“When?”

“It was on one of the anniversaries of the attack. Twenty, maybe twenty-fifth, I don’t remember. You can probably find it online.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “It’s pretty fascinating stuff.”

“How so?”

“It’s a perfect storm of what-if tragedy. The six had originally planned to hit another USO dance hall a month earlier, but Strauss had come down with appendicitis. What if he hadn’t? Several of the six were getting cold feet and threatened not to show. What if one or two had backed out? They were just stoned kids wanting to do some good. They didn’t set out to hurt anyone. So what if? What if that one Molotov cocktail hadn’t gone astray?”

I’m not impressed with this analysis. “Everything in life is a what-if.”

“True. Can I ask a question?”

I wait.

“Why isn’t Myron helping you? I mean, all the times you played Watson to Sherlock...”

“He’s busy.”

“With his new wife?”

I don’t feel right talking about Myron with her.

Jessica sits up. “You said you need to watch the documentary on the Jane Street Six.”

“I do.”

“Let’s watch it together and see what happens.”

Jessica lies on the right side of the bed, I take the left. Our bodies are close together. I prop up the laptop between us. She puts on reading glasses and flips off the lamp. I click the play button. We start watching the documentary in surprisingly comfortable silence. I find this whole experience odd. For me, Jessica was just an annoying and inconvenient extension of Myron, never her own being. To see or experience her with no attachment to him feels somehow uneasy, not in spite of the comfort but because of it. For the first time, I am seeing her as her own entity, not just Myron’s hot girlfriend.

I am not sure how I feel about that.

The documentary begins by pointing out that the group was never called the Jane Street Six. They were just six seemingly random college students, a ragtag splinter quasi-group from the Weather Underground or Students for a Democratic Society. The nickname Jane Street Six was given to them by the media after that disastrous night for the very simple reason that the famed photograph of the six of them had been taken in the basement of a town house on Jane Street in Greenwich Village. “ It was down in the dark dwelling ,” the serious narrator informed us, “ that they brewed the most deadly cocktail of all — the Molotov cocktail. ”