The Auction
Previously: Pawns in the Game
Eight white pawns with faces. A game room designed to keep people comfortable and irrelevant. Lodin emerges with his face closed like a book.
Read full sceneA narrow shop off Piccadilly. Lot 47. A man in a lavender tie who tripled every bid and smiled like a letter addressed personally.
Piccadilly / Mayfair Hotel London, England — October 1969
Roarke took Natasha. Black cab to Piccadilly. The auction house was a narrow shopfront between a tailor and a tobacco merchant – dark wood, brass fittings, glass cases full of naval memorabilia. A viewing area. A dozen men in tweed. Cold cuts and tea in proper cups.
He found it in the back corner. Lot 47. Admiral Tourney’s journal. The right-hand page, near the bottom, in handwriting that had gone tight and private: My greatest delight, though, was a memo from A relating that another fragment of the so-called Book of Nod has been – and the page ended there.
Roarke knew the name. Every ghoul who’d served long enough had heard it. The vampire Genesis. The text that recorded the curse and the origin. This was what Lodin flew across an ocean for.
He cased the room. Fourteen people. Twelve were what they looked like. Two weren’t. A heavyset collector from the Naval Heritage Foundation who’d been at the journal case for twenty minutes. And a younger man at the back wall who hadn’t looked at anything in particular but had looked at everyone.
American suit. American shoes. American tan. The professional stillness of someone who already knew how this ended and was letting the clock run.
Roarke had seen him before. The build. The posture. The dark sedan, two cars back on Lake Shore Drive.
The bidding started. Naval charts, medals, signal flags. The room thinned. The heavyset man stayed. The younger man stayed.
Lot 47. Two thousand pounds. The naval man raised his paddle. Roarke countered. Back and forth in careful increments – three thousand, four, five, six, seven. At seven thousand five hundred the naval man shook his head and set his paddle down.
Going once –
Twenty-two thousand five hundred.
Every head turned. The younger man. The American suit. The cold tea. Standing with no paddle, just a raised hand and a smile aimed at Roarke like a letter addressed to him personally.
He tripled Roarke’s counter. Then tripled again. Sixty-nine thousand pounds. Roarke bid seventy thousand from Lodin’s Swiss account because Lodin had said six words on a plane and those words didn’t have a ceiling.
The younger man shook his head. The gavel came down. He walked out past Roarke’s chair close enough that Roarke could smell the aftershave – American, expensive – and see the lavender tie.
A limousine waited at the curb. Natasha followed and lost him in two blocks.
Back at the hotel, Roarke gave Lodin everything. The journal, the price, the Swiss account, the man. Lodin listened. Said the Swiss account was the correct decision. Said the man in the lavender tie would surface again. They always do when they want something.
Then: the journal. Seven o’clock. You will retrieve it. Go alone.