Portrait of a thief, p.11
Portrait of a Thief, page 11
When Will checked his watch again, it was just past midnight. They had twenty-four hours left before the break-in. His gaze swept over his crew, over the moon reflected in water, to the distant horizon. Lights studded the space where black water met black sky. If he squinted, he could almost see the shape of Drottningholm Palace across the water, outlined in the waiting dark.
18
Irene
Irene Chen stood at the steps of Drottningholm Palace, her head tilted up toward the clear blue sky. To anyone else, she might have been taking in the splendor of the palace exterior, the rows of windows that reflected the light of the morning sun. Overhead, the Swedish flag whipped gold and blue against the cloudless sky.
“Well?” Alex Huang said in her ear. “What are you waiting for?”
Irene didn’t respond for a moment, her gaze lingering on the Royal Guards with their rifles and sharp-tipped hats, the cameras tucked discreetly at each entrance. If Irene had been her brother, Alex wouldn’t have asked. Drottningholm was lovely in the morning light, and the two of them were friends in a way that she and Alex weren’t. But Irene didn’t need Alex to like her. She just needed Alex to do her job.
“Six guards that I can see,” she said. “More that I can’t. Two cameras at the main door.” Before Alex could respond, Irene strode up the steps, past guards and cameras and into a museum flung open and waiting. She knew the cameras caught her—dark hair and a tapered camel coat, boots that clicked against the marble floor.
Let them, she thought.
“Make a right,” Alex said.
Irene, if she closed her eyes, could see the map of Drottningholm that they all knew so well. The main palace, the opera house, the gardens with their Baroque statues, stolen from Prague after a different war. And, of course, the Chinese Pavilion in gold and green and deep red, the zodiac head that waited for them within its walls. This was not the path that they would take tonight, but it would get her there regardless.
Irene, following Alex’s instructions, turned toward the northern wing of the palace. She could have been any other tourist, taking photos of the painted ceilings, the marble busts of long-dead kings. And if her phone also caught a security camera tucked in one corner, or a guard with his back turned? It was chance, nothing more.
“Now left,” Alex said. Irene was outside of the main palace now, and the gardens were spread out before her. They were green even in late October, with shrubs cut in precise geometric shapes, and though Irene knew the way forward as well as Alex did, she stopped at the fountain at the edge of the garden, reached for a map she didn’t have. There was a guard at the fountain, and when he looked up she smiled at him, lifted a hand.
“Excuse me,” Irene said, tilting her head so her hair fell over the wireless earbud tucked in one ear. Their burner phones had Bluetooth connectivity, but barely. “I’m a little lost. Can you point me to the Chinese Pavilion?”
“Irene,” Alex said slowly. Irene imagined her in their shared hotel room, laptop open and blue light casting shadows over her face, two sharp brows drawn together. “What are you doing?”
“Straight through the park,” the guard said, pointing southeast. “And then left into the forest, and then another left, well, somewhat—ah, I should have a few extra maps.”
Irene twisted her hands together. “That would help so much,” she said. “I’m supposed to be meeting my professor at the pavilion for a class and I’m already late—”
The guard patted his uniform again, searching. Up close, it was almost a Duke blue. “I’m sorry. I must have given them all away already.” He paused, taking in Irene’s expression. It was early enough that there was no one else in the gardens. “Do you want me to take you there?”
“Leave.” Alex’s voice was an order. “You’re drawing attention.”
“Please,” Irene said, her face breaking into a relieved smile. “If you don’t mind.”
They took the gardens at a brisk walk, almost a jog, the fall air crisp with possibility. “Thank you so much,” Irene said. “This is my first time visiting Drottningholm, and I expected—well, I expected it to be easier to navigate.”
“Happy to help,” he said. “We’re going to make a left here, cut through some of the gardens. Many visitors get lost on the palace grounds. That’s why we’re here. You are here on exchange, right? From China?”
“America, actually,” Irene said pleasantly. “My accent didn’t give it away? Everyone has been telling me that I drag my vowels.”
The guard nodded. “You do,” he said, and Irene laughed. “I’m just used to Chinese visitors to the pavilion. They tend to have a particular interest in our bronze snake head.”
“Shit,” Alex said.
“How fascinating,” Irene said easily. “I don’t actually know anything about the art at the Chinese Pavilion. My architecture professor just wanted us to visit because the pavilion exemplifies the merging of Western and Eastern design.”
“That it does,” he said. “Drottningholm Palace has many wonders, but the Chinese Pavilion is special. Do you want to hear about some of its art?”
“Please,” Irene said. In the distance, she could see the curved roof of the Chinese Pavilion, gold in the morning light. “Tell me more.”
* * *
“What the hell was that?” Alex demanded once the guard had left. “You could have just taken a map. Or listened to his directions. Or listened to me. You knew how to get here.”
There were no cameras outside the Chinese Pavilion, no guards, just this summer palace, surrounded by trees and red, falling leaves. “Maybe I forgot,” Irene said, walking up the pavilion steps. “Besides, he was out of maps.”
“You were flirting.”
“I wasn’t.” Her mind was not on this conversation but on the path the guard had cut through the gardens, the turns they had made through green shrubs and carefully maintained grass. “Not that it matters.”
Alex was still talking, but Irene wasn’t paying attention anymore. She pulled the door open, walked in, the click of her heels loud against the polished wooden floors. There were guards inside, cameras that flashed in the quiet light, and Irene took her time as she moved through the rooms of the pavilion. Each one was a different color, tinting silk wallpaper and porcelain vases in jade green or decadent red, a yellow that gleamed like the sun. Rococo, Irene remembered. Will was the artist in the family, but she knew enough to recognize the extravagance here. Art could be beauty, but it was also power. Look, it demanded, and don’t turn away.
And then, in a room lined in blue and gold, Irene saw the bronze snake head. She was not foolish enough to linger on it, though she knew no one would think anything of it if she did. It was the room’s centerpiece, after all, and the bronze flashed like a beckoning hand. Instead she examined the other pieces in the glass showcases that lined the room, caught a glimpse of a camera in a reflection as she turned away.
In her ear, Alex’s voice was a low, angry murmur, less than background noise. Irene continued through the Chinese Pavilion, taking care to visit every room, to spend the same amount of time in each, building this palace in her head. This was how the rooms opened into each other; these were the hallways and the windows and the high, reaching archways, lined in gold and stolen history.
At last, Irene left the pavilion, crossing the threshold into sunlight and the slight October chill, a sky cracked open. As she walked down the steps, she removed a handful of palace maps from the inside pocket of her coat, dropped them into the waiting trash can. It had been so easy to brush against the guard, to lift these maps from the outer pocket of his uniform and pretend she did not know the way to go. In Drottningholm Palace’s four hundred years of history, it had never been robbed.
That would change soon enough.
19
Alex
Alex Huang could not remember the last time she had been angry. Growing up, she had watched her parents spend late nights balancing checkbooks, early mornings with customers who spoke in loud, overenunciated English. In high school, she had seen for the first time the stark contrast between her life and that of other Asian Americans in New York City, classmates who talked about Chinatown as a place for cheap eats, who always had money to spend on private tutors and SAT prep courses. At MIT, it had been the same way. Friends who called themselves upper middle class, who assumed Alex was the same way, who spoke of the Chinese American experience of science fairs and summer trips to Beijing or Shanghai as if it were universal. What was the point in calling it unjust? What was the point in calling it anything at all? When a classmate found out that she had gotten a return offer from Google, he had looked at her and said, so softly she could have convinced herself she’d imagined it, a diversity hire. She hadn’t been angry then either. She would do the work. She would do it better. That was all there was.
From her hotel room, Alex Huang looked out at the Stockholm skyline, her gaze tracing the line of buildings against the water, the bright, flashing light of the morning sun. She was slow to anger. Of course she was. She had been so many things before. A first-generation college student, a college dropout, a daughter and granddaughter of immigrants. A woman in tech, surrounded by software engineers who never quite saw her as one of them. If she let herself be angry, her anger would spill over. It would burn her alive.
The door to the hotel room opened. Alex turned, met Irene’s gaze. Her whole life, she’d always had something to prove. And then there was Irene, who belonged everywhere she went, who did not need this job or anything else, who had never known what it was like to fight so hard to be seen as equal, as enough. Irene had never wanted for anything in her life, and yet Alex had thought—well, she had thought that Irene would do this right anyway. What had Will said about his sister? She had never failed at anything.
Alex took a step forward. Drottningholm in gold and sprawling green, Irene and a guard walking side by side. She could see it, even now. “What were you thinking?”
In the morning light, Irene’s face might have been carved by a sculptor’s hand, high cheekbones and a lovely, bored mouth. “Are you still on this?” she said.
“Am I still on this?” Alex asked. “You literally asked a guard for directions to the place we’re going to rob tonight.” Saying it aloud—it might have been funny if it hadn’t been so reckless.
Irene slipped off her coat, her shoes, the motions slow and unhurried, and set her tote on the desk that Alex was leaning against. She brushed close enough that Alex had to shift out of the way, just slightly. Somehow it felt like a concession.
“I did my job,” Irene said.
Irene moved through the world like it was meant to give way before her. Alex crossed her arms. “Your job was to listen to me,” she said, because she was angry, because it was true. “But instead—what? You decided you knew better? That you didn’t need help? All you had to do was walk through a museum and not draw attention. Everything else is done.”
Irene laughed. “Right.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Irene raised a brow. “One month,” she said slowly. “One month and you couldn’t figure out how to hack into museum security. You couldn’t figure out how to shut off the Drottningholm alarms. Tonight, three of us will rob a museum, and you’ll watch as the alarms go off. Tell me again how I didn’t do my job.”
The hotel room was silent. Morning light cut a solitary square on the carpeted floor, and dust motes spun in slow, lazy circles above it. Out of the corner of her eye, Alex saw the door linking this room and the adjacent one crack open. Will, maybe, or Daniel, looking to play mediator. She strode to the door, slammed it shut before turning to face Irene. It had been one month already. One month of Irene acting like this heist was not Alex’s too, like Alex was the one who was failing them. Irene, who got along with everybody, who Will claimed had once talked a Chinese museum curator into gifting her something from his personal collection, had never looked at Alex and seen anything worth keeping.
“Fuck you,” Alex said.
Irene’s smile was cold, mocking.
Alex couldn’t look at her anymore. Instead she crossed the room to the open window, the balcony beyond it. In the sunlight, Stockholm was something out of a postcard, blue skies and distant, white-capped water, a palace rising from the waves. “I got in,” Alex said, gaze still on the horizon, Drottningholm Palace outlined in light. “Not that it matters, but I got in.”
They had all thought she couldn’t. Alex had thought she couldn’t. For all that Will liked to claim she was a hacker, she wasn’t, and this was strange, uncrossed territory. But she had spent her whole life doing the impossible, and one late night, her room cast in blue light, Alex had watched Drottningholm Palace unfold on her screen, security feeds and alarm networks and a flickering mesh of possibility at her fingertips.
Then she had slammed her computer shut.
Irene’s voice was a question. “But you won’t turn off the alarms.”
“I’m good at my job,” Alex said. The sky was a pure, uninterrupted blue. Far below, streets and cars and pedestrians were small, make-believe. “But I’m not FBI. If I shut down Drottningholm, they’ll be able to trace it back to us. We care about getting out. The alarms won’t keep you from making it in. But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
Irene crossed the room, came to stand by her side. It was just the two of them, faces turned toward Stockholm, toward Drottningholm, toward all the danger their future held. “I talked to the guard,” Irene said, her voice low, “because tonight, when the alarms go off, we’ll need to know the route the guards will take. The path he showed me, the fastest path to the Chinese Pavilion—that’s the path we’ll have to avoid.”
Alex let out a long, slow breath. It wasn’t an apology. “You could have told me.”
“Would you have said yes?”
“You didn’t give me a choice.”
“I know.” Irene reached out, caught a strand of Alex’s hair between her thumb and forefinger. Alex did not flinch, not even when Irene’s knuckles brushed the edge of her jaw. What were they? Tied together in this, no matter how much they didn’t want to be. Just a few months, and they would have everything they ever wanted. Alex thought of when all this began, Beijing as the night fell. She thought of these past few weeks, Irene and her carefully constructed smiles, her words like the edge of a blade. It was better like this, maybe. To have all of it peeled back. To know that it wasn’t in her imagination.
Alex caught Irene’s wrist. For a brief, terrible moment, she was tempted to press, to see what would happen if she did. Instead she let go. What good did anger do? Ten million dollars. Her life and how it changed. She could survive this. She could survive anything. “Do your job, Irene,” she said. “And let me do mine.”
We’re a team, Irene could have said. Our jobs are one and the same. But Irene had never liked her, and so instead she smiled. It didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Stay out of my way, Alex.”
Alex would not let it hurt.
20
Daniel
Daniel Liang leaned against the railing of the hotel balcony, the iron cool against his skin. When he turned his phone over in his hand, clock face glowing blue in the darkness, he named flexors, extensors, branching vessels, anatomy pared down, stripped clean. This was what he knew. This was what stayed the same.
Tonight, after they had robbed Drottningholm Palace, he would not be the same person he was. But skin and tendon and bone would remain. He could hold on to this if nothing else.
Before he could change his mind, he pressed dial. The sound of the phone ringing, signal traveling across continents, was loud in the tentative dark.
“Hello?”
“Ba,” Daniel said. His dad had picked up on the first ring. It was not enough time for him to figure out what to say.
“Son,” he said. Silence stretched between them, and Daniel heard the shuffling of papers, the sound of a folder closing. “Have you been getting enough sleep?”
“Yes, Ba.”
“How are your classes?”
This was easy. The questions, the answers. Daniel thought of a week ago, Alex in his childhood home, the three of them making dumplings together. He could not remember the last time he had cooked with his dad. He could not remember the last time he had called his dad like this. He was searching for something, he knew. He would not call it forgiveness.
“Fine,” he said. Hard, he wanted to add, because they were. For all the time he spent on this job, he spent just as much on classes, on interview prep, on everything that went into making him the person he wanted so desperately to become. It was worth it. It didn’t mean he wasn’t tired.
His dad was silent. “Anything else?” he asked.
Change always felt like too much, like not enough. He didn’t know what else to say. Before him, Stockholm was nothing but pinpricks of light in the darkness, distant and insignificant. “Will we go back to China this year?” Daniel didn’t know where the question came from. In this hotel room, on the cusp of change, he was missing home.
“Of course,” his dad said. Beijing and its sharp, lovely sounds, gray skies and harsh light, art museums and his mother’s curved tomb. Whatever else changed, there was this. “Every year.”
“Okay,” Daniel said. When summer came, when they flew back to Beijing, these five thefts would be done. He dug his thumb into the palm of his hand, thought of capillaries breaking, blood that rose red and dark. “Nothing else,” he said.
