He knows where Teivel works and lives and now where this Baine guy works. It will not be difficult to find out where Baine lives too.

He watches the red dot move, allows the American a good head start, then follows him into the subway station and onto the subway, maintaining a safe distance, eyeing him through a dozen straphangers. He closes his eyes. Once again pictures the American’s loft, the large airy studio and canvases slick with paint. A life so unlike his own, though he sometimes has trouble imagining that his own life is real. A young woman beside him, a girl really, kohl-lined eyes, hair streaked purple, a ring through her nose, keeps falling into him each time the train stops and lurches.

She reminds him of his first job after the war, the young girls he sold to traders, something he could not get away with nowadays with all the do-gooders and international agencies up in arms. What did they know? It was not as if those girls had anything better at home. He has to stop himself from looping a finger through the girl’s nose ring and leading her off the train, making her his slave. He smiles at her, but she stares ahead, her earbuds obviously drowning out all surrounding noise, her look blank, transported no doubt by some idiotic tune, which sounds to him like insects chirping.

He looks past the girl and through the crowd to make sure the American is still there. He tugs his hat lower on his forehead, pats his breast pocket, feels the tube he made from the picture he ripped out of the book. He pictures the Medusa painting, the slithering snakes and severed neck, all that blood, the look of pure terror. Every job teaches him something. This one, about the artist Caravaggio. Obviously, a kindred spirit.

91

For eight dollars, Intelius, the online public-records search engine, had provided the address on East Thirty-Second Street. It was not at all what I’d expected. I had always pictured Alex in a plush Upper East Side apartment with river views and two or three doormen, not in Murray Hill, a neighborhood that drew students and young people looking for reasonable rents.

I checked the address again to be sure, then made my way to the redbrick midsize building. There was a doorman, but only one. I asked for Alexis Verde, and when he said she was out, I made a show of checking my cell phone and said something about possibly getting the time wrong, then turned and headed down the block, a part of me relieved. I hadn’t planned what I would say if she’d been home. At the corner, I stopped and waited.

Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. A part of me wanted to run, but I had to see her, had to know who she was and why she had lied.

I started making a list in my head, why I loved her, or thought I did: her looks, her brains, her wit, her voice, her poise, her touch, the way she seemed to get me. Though it was possible everything had been a lie. The only thing I knew for sure was that I was in thrall to a woman I thought I had known but didn’t.